Ok, this is just getting silly – on Saturday, the Justice Department announced that the FBI found more documents in its search of the Biden residence in Delaware.
This is the fourth new discovery of improperly stored state secrets, and comes after the President himself defiantly said of the delay between the first discovery at the Penn-Biden Center in November and the public revelation of it earlier this month “there’s no there there,” and “I have no regrets.”
At least he didn’t resort to defensive humor, as then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did in 2015 when she scoffed “what did I use a cloth?” to wipe the email servers she’d kept off-site when serving as secretary of state. But still.
Then there is the discovery of visitor logs for the Biden residence just two days after the White House told us no such logs existed. Oops. Guess no one figured the Secret Service might be keeping notes after all.
The latest document disclosure came just hours after reports that White House chief-of-staff Ron Klain will be leaving as soon as a replacement can be found. After four years of constant turbulence during the Trump administration, some wishful thinkers lulled themselves into thinking that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had returned to the cozy comfort of The West Wing.
No, one can only imagine the chaos that this Chinese water torture of document discoveries (and before Hunter gets too excited about the prospect of new business deals, the drip-drip-drip process is not actually Chinese but was rather developed by an Italian in the Sixteenth Century) is having on an administration already reeling from its flat-footed communications strategy about all this.
It strains credulity to imagine that anyone is naturally this incompetent. Once again, we can only wonder whether someone on the inside is leaving this trail of breadcrumbs to lead to the inevitable conclusion that there is no way the octogenarian Biden can possibly seek a second term.
Quo bono?
Someone would have to be awfully calculating, devious and connected to pull off a series of stunts like this. Such a person would have to have their own former aides embedded in the White House, preferably in a thematic area close to the foreign affairs origin of the documents that keep getting ‘discovered.’ Who could that be?
Gosh, I can’t think of anyone. It must therefore be organic.
But regardless, the problem of a glaring and growing double standard persists. As I’ve already opined more than once in this space, ordinary folks like you and me go to prison for this sort of thing. Rules for thee, but not for me, and all that.
Still, unfairness when it comes to the governing elite is a notion as old as governance itself. It is older even than Biden. We ordinary people have more pressing concerns, like inflationary pressures that drive up the price of eggs and everything else, or recessionary fears fueled by mass lay-offs America’s largest firms keep announcing. These things are real, and there is little evidence that an administration that can’t properly file state secrets has a plan for fixing any of this.
Drip, drip, drip goes the discovery process. Where will the next batch of classified documents show up? Perhaps authorities should check the Biden Rest Stop on I-95 in Christiana, Delaware. Or they might look, God forbid, on Hunter’s laptop.
