With every new cache of classified documents discovered in Joe Biden’s possession, the president’s excuses become more farfetched.
Biden’s defenders like to stress that the president has “cooperated” with investigators. No harm, no foul. Ana Navarro of “The View” argues “it’s very important to understand the difference between cooperation and obstruction.” Neal Katyal snarks that it’s “amazing how you don’t need a search warrant when a President is actually willing to invite investigators inside.”
Not really. Biden’s lawyers almost surely asked for an FBI search of the president’s property after they knew special counsel Robert Hur would be compelled to obtain a warrant and conduct a search. Don’t take my word for it. Buried in today’s New York Times piece on the matter, we learn that, “[e]veryone involved understood and agreed that the discovery of those six pages meant that the government would have to conduct its own search of the work and storage areas in the house…” There was no political or legal upside in resisting the inevitable.
Which brings us to another pervasive defense of the president, which asserts that Biden had “immediately” handed over documents found in his “think tank,” just as protocol dictates. No harm, no foul. This claim is also preposterous. All we know for sure is that Biden was in possession of classified documents, including some top secret ones, for at least six years — perhaps decades, since some of the documents date back to his time in the Senate. That, at
