What if it had been a VW Bug? Or a Kia? I mean, what if Joe Biden’s garage, in addition to housing classified documents, was sporting something other and less sexy than his snazzy 1967 Corvette? What then?
Joe himself seems to have set great store by his classic car. It’s the thing he mentions most frequently and most passionately when asked about the cardboard boxes stacked behind it, some of which contained secret U.S. government provender dating from his time as Barack Obama’s vice president. “It’s not like the documents were just strewn about,” Joe protested (I paraphrase to save the White House occupant embarrassment). “My Corvette is in there. The garage door has a lock on it.”
Well, OK, then.
Nothing to see here, what? Time to move on? (I thought about using a period there, but I think we can all agree that a question mark with a twist of valley-girl upspeak pleading is more appropriate.)
It’s been amusing to absorb the commentary on this latest Top-Secret-Special-Compartmentalized-Nuclear-Coded-Eyes-Only fiasco. “Some of our country’s most sensitive 411,” blah, blah, blah. It was CBS News that first broke the story of Joe and his adventures with classified docs that he shouldn’t have had in his possession. Just last week the world discovered that the Washington office of the “Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement” [!], a Chinese-funded “dark-money nightmare,” had a cache of secret stuff. Then we learned about the garage sale, no Corvettes included, wheeze. And then, just a few days ago, the world woke up to, wouldn’t you know it, yet more classified docs stashed away somewhere among Joe’s collection of aviators in his Delaware home. As I write, Biden’s lawyers (nota bene, not the FBI) have found five more pages of classified material in the library at Biden’s home. Who knows where else he has the forbidden docs stashed?
When the SWAT teams of the FBI swooped down on Mar-a-Lago in August, packing plenty of heat, regulation shades, and those nifty jackets with “FBI” in super big letters just to let everyone know how important they are, they didfind some secret stuff in folders marked “Classified.” They also found more that 1,600 newspaper clippings filed away there, not to mention various passports belonging to the Trump family (a flight risk, Virginia?) and who-knows-what in Melania’s lingerie drawer.
Opinions vary about the seriousness of Trump’s tort. I have to say that I thought the whole thing was faintly absurd, not to say malodorously politicized. Experts disagree about this, but I am with those who point out that, as president, Trump could declassify anything he wanted to. He says he did. Others disagree.
Nobody disagrees, though, that Biden as vice president did not have plenary authority to declassify classified material. In any event, last fall, long before the world knew that Joe Biden was guilty of essentially the same thing that Donald Trump was, Merrick Garland, our very own walking cadaver of an attorney general, wagged his finger and assigned a special counsel (get yours before they’re sold out!) to “investigate” Trump for—for what? If you listen to the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe (I do not advise it) , Trump might be guilty of a very long list of felonies, including witness tampering, obstruction of justice, criminal election violations, Logan Act violations, extortion, espionage, and treason by Trump or his family. You read Tribe’s hysterical emission and you realize that the Babylon Bee might be more documentary than satire. “DOJ Indicts Trump for Biden’s Possession of Classified Documents,” a recent headline screamed. Satire? Or memo from the Central Committee, bent as it is on jettisoning Donald Trump from the body politic ASAP?
Bye bye, so long, farewell!
But how about good old Scranton, first-in-his-law-class Joe Biden? Well, that’s another matter altogether. Yes, Garland, not entirely oblivious to the political optics of the situation, did assign a special counsel to look into things after the third cache of classified docs came to light, but that counsel was one Robert Hur, U.S. attorney for Baltimore but, more to the point, an anti-Trump former Robert Mueller apparatchik and “swamp monster of the tier-one level.” I wonder whether the committee will succeed in putting that one over.
But here is the thing. Remember when the deep state clamped down on any mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Twitter shut down the account of the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in the country, because the paper was publicizing the story just weeks before the 2020 election. We now know that it was not “Russian disinformation,” as sweaty weasel John Brennan and his 50 “top intelligence” dittoheads said. It was true, all true, and had the story been allowed to circulate it might well have changed the outcome of the 2020 election (I mean, it might well have changed the publicly approved outcome of the election: every honest person knows the election was tainted).
So here we have Joe Biden’s many caches of classified docs. Who, what, where, when, why? When was it discovered that he had such contraband stashed away in insecure places? I’m glad you asked. We’re told that “his lawyers” first discovered the top-secret stuff in his office on November 2, 2022. Who put it there? Who moved it around? Aides? We don’t know. But we do know they were ready when the story became public. “We instantly told the National Archives!” team Biden shouted, “and they then came and carted the stuff away.” Unlike the naughty Trump, you see, who stalled and prevaricated for months.
That’s as may be. What stands out to me, though, is the date: November 2—less than a week away from the midterm elections. How do you suppose publicity about Biden’s being guilty of the same thing Trump was accused of would have played on Election Day? (Yes, I know there really isn’t an Election Day any longer, but we still pretend that there is.)
Biden said he was “surprised” that the classified documents were in his possession. That was supposed to be an exonerating response, but, pace the snake Andrew Weissmann, it is not, legally, exonerating, nor, as a matter of politics, is it reassuring. I mean, there can be no doubt that Joe Biden is “surprised” by many things these days. Which brings me to what I suspect might well be the real significance of this episode. Writing at American Greatness, Josh Hammer recently speculated about whether the deep state is “now coming after Joe Biden.”
That is a relevant question. As I suggested last March, Biden’s handlers have long been poised to eject both him and his cackler-in-chief, Kamala Harris. I noted there and elsewhere that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later lead to his ejection from the magic circle of the presidency by the committee that got him elected and which sustains him. Admittedly, I said, “it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall.”
The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the ‘issue is never the issue.’ Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word ‘voters’ brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces.
I went on to note that the mandarins who rule us, far from being troubled by the suffering of ordinary people, actually approve of a certain amount of suffering. “Suffering produces dependency,” I wrote, “and dependency, in turn, is like an insurance policy for those who cater to it: the bureaucrats who fill the troughs that feed the populace. The point, of course, was never to end the dependency but to manage in such a way as to perpetuate and expand it. Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great (not to say Great Society) act of political legerdemain.”
Well, Joe Biden’s usefulness may be coming to an end. Could he possibly run for reelection in 2024, let alone win it? No. He wouldn’t be allowed to hide out in his basement this time, for one thing. Then, too, his mental decline, obvious for years, is now a daily embarrassment. Ejecting Kamala Harris will also be necessary, just as it was necessary to defenestrate Spiro Agnew before cashiering Nixon.
It will not, as I noted, be so easy to uncouple Harris from the ticket as it was to knock out “Nolo Contendere” Agnew. After all, she is not only partly black but is also female, so she qualifies twice over for protected status. But she can be bought off, and I suspect that is what we will see happen. She’ll soon be tapped for some especially lucrative and prestigious position and will accept it as an act of “healing” or some such.
Many people have noted that the revelations about Biden’s possession of classified documents make it much harder for the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. This, I think, is true. But it also makes it much more likely that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will both need to start thinking about what they are going to do after their terms in office are up. The contract, alas for them, will not be renewed.