President Biden’s Document Drama: Stick to the Facts, Joe

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jan 18, 2023

And more documents were found even after the former president’s lawyer signed an affidavit saying everything had been located.

Some of Trump’s allies gamely tried to argue that a president can declassify a document just by thinking about it. In this telling, any documents Trump brought home had been declassified just because he took them — and were therefore already in the public domain.

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called that dubious line of argument the “Green Lantern” theory, as if presidential power can be conjured up by merely wanting it badly enough — like the comic book hero.

But the presidency is governed by more than willpower. There are also such formalities as laws, rules and constitutional constraints, especially when you’re dealing with something as sensitive as national security.

But in the world of politics, perceptions can matter as much as statutory laws. When we, the public, learned that a second batch of classified material from Biden’s time as vice president had been found in a search of his Delaware home, the information was relayed to the Justice Department before Christmas.

Yet the White House failed to disclose it this week when the Biden administration spoke about the initial batch of documents found last year in an office Biden previously used at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington. That made the new disclosure look like the administration was willing to tell all to the Justice Department, but not to the American public.

Fortunately for Team Biden, the Justice Department considered having FBI agents monitor a search by Biden’s lawyers for classified documents at his home, but decided against it, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. That was partly to avoid complicating later stages of the investigation, and partly because Biden’s lawyers had quickly cooperated with the first batch and were continuing to do so.

Let’s hear it for transparency. The White House will have to face the familiar and unsettling hubbub of a Washington scandal, including inquisitions from reporters and the inevitable Watergate question: “What did the president know and when did he know it.”

But, as much as partisans will hear what they want to hear, whether pro-Biden or not, it is crucially important that they cling transparently to the truth — and avoid the wrong perceptions.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)