Not unlike his predecessor, President Joe Biden seems to like to keep important information close to home.
A new trove of classified materials was discovered this week in a “locked” garage and at least one room of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware mansion. Biden confessed to reporters on Thursday that most of the sensitive documents recovered at his home from his years as vice president were kept next to his Corvette until they were found in December.
Instead of launching an hours-long raid at the sitting president’s swanky $2 million property as the FBI did when they discovered former President Donald Trump had classified documents in his private residence, Attorney General Merrick Garland reported that the FBI peacefully retrieved the materials from Biden’s home.
Similarly, the classified Obama-era documents discovered in November, shortly before the midterm elections, in a closet at Biden’s Washington, D.C.-based Penn Biden Center were quietly retrieved and turned over to the National Archives. Word of the classified materials recovered from Biden wasn’t revealed to the public until months later.
All things considered, the document scandal ranks low on Biden’s list of self-inflicted crises over the last two years, as Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland noted in her coverage earlier today.
The media’s compulsion to cover for the regime, however, propelled audible and written defenses of the president for the same behavior they eviscerated Trump for.
All week, corporate media preoccupied themselves with outlining how the Trump and Biden document discoveries were marked by several “clear distinctions.” Biden only possessed a “small number” of classified documents compared to Trump, media argued, automatically making his offense much smaller than the Republican’s.
Trump likely broke the law, publications like The New York Times and talking heads on MSNBC suggested. Biden, however, is being painted as blameless since his team agreed to “cooperate” with his own administration’s DOJ and National Archives — just not Republican investigators.
Another distinction suggested by the press, even before the latest round of documents was reported, was that Trump’s storing documents at his private residence, a secure property protected by the Secret Service, was somehow far worse than Biden leaving documents in a closet in a busy public office building in Washington D.C.
“The Biden papers were said to be stored in a locked closet. The Mar-a-Lago classified documents were found in 12 boxes piled in a storage room, as well as in Trump’s office,” one opinion contributor argued in the pages of The Hill.
“Another difference between the Trump & Biden doc cases is the nature of the storage. Biden’s docs were discovered in a locked closet. Trump kept his docs in an unsecured location at Mar-a-Lago (a known target of foreign intel ops) & refused to secure them after DOJ asked them to,” a columnist for The Independent tweeted.
Using the “where” to distinguish between Trump and Biden’s document problems was a bad argument from the start. Now that Biden is fending off criticism for keeping classified materials in his home, that weak excuse is null and void.
When the FBI launched a surprise raid on Mar-a-Lago, ostensibly over classified materials, the media used the “where” to justify their ongoing persecution of Trump. But when classified materials were discovered in Biden’s private residence, Biden and his allies in the media lamely insisted the documents were safe and secure in a “locked” garage.
The true distinction between Trump and Biden’s document snafus, of course, lies not in how, when, or where the documents were discovered but in the National Archives’ lack of cooperation with Trump.
Will that be considered by the special counsel, handpicked by the same guy who authorized the raid on Trump? Likely not.
Regardless, the corporate media will keep shilling for Biden, even as the so-called “clear distinctions” between his and Trump’s behavior become further muddled.