Rachel Maddow contrasts the way Trump handles news of classified documents in their respective offices to illustrate why the Biden story doesn’t make sense.
Mado Video:
Mado said:
As I said, there was a brief moment of excitement on the right about the process tonight when the news broke about the Biden Center in Pennsylvania. The reason for the fleeting excitement is that in President Biden’s case, he and his lawyers do seem to be doing the right thing when it comes to handling these classified documents. Biden’s lawyers said they discovered the documents on Nov. 2 among his vice-presidential files. The same day, the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives of the discovery. Apparently, the National Archives didn’t even know the documents were missing and didn’t seek their return.
The next morning, the archives took custody of the material. That seems to be the case. Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked the last Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to review the documents found at the Biden Center in Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t sound like an adversarial process at all. The White House said it was cooperating fully with the National Archives and the Justice Department in the review.
Again, it’s not like in Trump’s case, where the archives were desperately demanding the return of materials that Trump had abandoned, and Trump dropped those requests, eventually rescinding the subpoena to return them.
The documents appear to have been discovered by Biden’s lawyers and inadvertently deposited at the Biden Center in Pennsylvania. They notified the White House, which immediately notified the National Archives that the documents had been misplaced. Move archives to retrieve them instantly. That seems to be the sum total of it, as far as we can tell.
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The current president obeys the law. The former president chose to break the law. This is the difference between the two personalities. This is one of the reasons why Joe Biden is the incumbent president and Donald Trump is not.
For a moment, Republicans thought they had a Biden scandal, but their hopes were dashed as Biden’s actions demonstrated why Trump should be indicted.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a congressional correspondent for the White House Press Fellowship and PoliticusUSA. Jason has a BA in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, specializing in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Association of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association
