The old adage about the cover-up being worse than the crime did not originate with Watergate, but President Richard Nixon's downfall is surely the most notable modern example.
Until now, some might say.
President Joe Biden's deepening classified document scandal has no current arrow that points directly to an impeachment or resignation drama, but in a year that will feature countless moving parts shaping both the Democratic and Republican presidential fields for 2024, it is worth an early assessment of what kind of political damage the president is suffering—and what lies ahead.
Let's stipulate that there is a Republican chorus eager to whip this to maximum gravity already, as Democratic defenders dismiss such cries as opportunistic politics while doing their best to minimize the growing crisis.
Amid that spin battle, what do we actually have here?
We have a steady stream of discoveries of classified documents in various locations that Biden simply should not have. If we stop right there, it is safe to assume most Americans would not be so shocked to learn of officials accidentally taking a box or two of sensitive materials out the door as they leave office. Indeed, last night, there was yet another breaking story about documents found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, whose attorneys handed them over promptly to the FBI. It's enough to make one wonder what we would find if we sorted through the personal papers of former presidents and vice presidents for the last 100 years.
But two additional factors give the Biden documents heightened stigma. First, the president, his party, and their amen chorus in the legacy media have just taken us through an extended panic attack upon the discovery of classified materials at former President Donald Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago. Their drumbeat for a fast-tracked criminal prosecution in that case now returns to bite them.
Second, while one may doubt Trump's claim that he declassified the materials found in last August's raid at his Palm Beach estate, it is irrefutable that he in fact has declassification authority. Vice presidents, by contrast, have no such constitutional authority; so now that Biden's home has been searched, his stack of troubling papers disproportionately grows in both suspicion and size.
The papers that launched this mess were found by Biden private attorneys on November 2, 2022 at the Penn Biden Center. That news did not manage to reach the public in time for the midterm elections, held just six days later. But that is not even the most unsettling element of the timing surrounding that initial discovery. Biden departed the Obama White House in January 2017 and the Penn Biden Center opened in February 2018; therefore, sensitive papers were carted to some other destination in the year-plus between Biden's White House office and his private office.
Did anyone know this? Did private attorneys see those documents, at the time? If so, they lacked the proper security clearances to do so. Thus began a trail of potential lawbreaking that leads us to the current standoff between an administration with zipped lips and a nation with mounting questions.
With a special counsel already sniffing around the Trump document story, Attorney General Merrick Garland had no choice but to appoint a similar special counsel to investigate the corresponding Biden document issues. This hands the Biden White House a natural response: that they are constrained by an ongoing Department of Justice probe. But that doesn't mean that response is going well.
The eternally struggling Karine Jean-Pierre, whose tenure as Biden's White House press secretary has been littered with underwhelming moments, has become a sympathetic figure in this period, where her tortured answers are not actually her own fault. Press secretaries are not debaters empowered to riff on the fly with a toolbox of well-crafted arguments hatched at will; they are mouthpieces serving at the will of the president, tasked with delivering the president's message with precision. And Jean-Pierre's boss is not exactly giving her material to work with at the moment.
The enduring quote from the past couple of scandal-ridden weeks is that Biden takes matters of classified documents "very seriously"—a claim that has bordered on parody, given the discovery of ever-increasing items that have been mishandled despite that purported "seriousness."
What becomes serious now is the political price to be paid by Joe Biden. While a certain protective circle has predictably swaddled him, there are voices in the Democratic Party and the legacy media that are increasingly turning up the heat.
Consider this quote, which could well have come from any of Biden's most partisan Republican foes: "It is this drip, drip, drip of revelations that is only deepening the president's political problem, giving ammunition to his critics. There are still a lot of basic questions left unanswered, including: How did these documents get there? What's in them, and did the president have any idea where any of them were in his home or his private office?"
That's not from the Republican National Committee. It's from ABC, where Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce can be found among a press corps now practicing actual journalism, against the political interests of the very president the major networks helped elect in 2020.
In every corner of liberal America, the focus has shifted to who can win in 2024, and that answer keeps coming up: not Joe Biden. He is thus expendable in this moment, in service to the greater good.
If these trends continue and the coming weeks and months feature a White House taking fire from all sides on the classified documents scandal, it will be a new test of Biden's resiliency. Not three months ago, the nation's economy and borders were in shambles, and Biden's party performed better than all sides expected in the midterm elections.
The 2024 election is still miles down the road. But the path in that direction will reveal to us just how much the public cares about the handling of classified materials—and more to the point, the personal integrity of the commander-in-chief.
Mark Davis is a talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
