President Biden’s Document Drama: Stick to the Facts, Joe
Well, that was fun while it lasted.
President Joe Biden benefited mightily from the 15-ballot display of disarray by House Republicans to settle the usually routine matter of electing one of their fellow partisans to be speaker of the House.
But that was before he fell into a classified document drama of his own.
Last week Biden’ tried to show with a visit to the southern border that he was serious about dealing with border security. The documents scandal flap followed him.
The same thing happened two days later when he tried to take some credit for a slowdown in inflation, one of the issues with which Republicans pounded him last year. The questions from reporters turned into a back-and-forth interrogation over the documents.
From a brutally raw political viewpoint, the nagging controversy over the documents has ended a winning streak of good news that followed the worse-than-expected performance of Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
The bad news for the White House is the administration’s tepid public relations performance so far, as they try to drum up some confidence that Democrats will be able to hold onto their message amid the raging storm — and hold off added turbulence that could face Biden’s expected announcement soon of another presidential run.
For now, the best news for Biden is that he still apparently faces less legal exposure than former President Donald Trump. A lot less.
This much we know: When Biden’s lawyers found the first secret vice presidential file in his former Washington office last fall, they cooperated swiftly with the National Archives.
That simple voluntary act may have spared him the potentially criminal exposure from the discovery that Trump potentially faces over his own document haul in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Trump had to be hounded for the government documents, including classified material that was only retrieved when the FBI executed a search warrant at his home.
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