Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

US politics has driven a lot of confusion lately.

The drip-drip of news over the last week about classified files found in President Biden’s home and his post-vice-presidential office has given Republican members of Congress plenty of fodder for talking points. “Where’s the raid?” Representative Jim Jordan, the newly appointed chair of the House judiciary committee, asked in a tweet.

The Biden documents investigation was handled for almost two months by a specially chosen U.S. attorney in Illinois, but when new revelations surfaced last week, Merrick Garland — seemingly always happy to give in to bad faith framing — quickly appointed a Republican special counsel to take over the matter. This mirrors the special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s handling of classified presidential files and his activities around the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The special counsels have given ammunition to pundits, opinion writers and G.O.P. officials to try to create a false equivalency between the two men. For many, the Biden hullabaloo manifests as a pox-on-both-their-houses scandal — he’s just like Mr. Trump!

But a closer, fuller examination of both the presidency and historical prosecutions for mishandling classified records actually makes the opposite case: Mr. Biden’s mishandling of a limited number of classified files, which upon discovery were promptly turned over to the National Archives and proper authorities, should make the reasoning, and necessity, of prosecuting Mr. Trump all the more clear.

Mr. Biden’s handling of the issue — especially given the more detailed timeline recently released by the White House — shows how an official who finds misfiled or improperly stored classified files should react. Mr. Biden’s behavior stands in sharp contrast to that of Mr. Trump, who spent months fighting with the National Archives over the files and repeatedly assured the Justice Department that he had turned over all files, even when he was still — apparently knowingly — holding onto scores of classified files. He failed to comply with a legal subpoena, and only then did the F.B.I. move to search his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Mr. Biden’s scandal so far feels more like an administrative error; there’s no evidence he even knew the documents were misplaced or in his possession, and when discovered they were promptly and properly returned to authorities. The government didn’t know they were missing (which itself is a bit of a mystery, since classified documents are usually tightly controlled, which is how the National Archives knew Mr. Trump had missing documents in the first place), and Mr. Biden didn’t try to hold onto them in the face of a legal process ordering otherwise.

In a tweet, the former Missouri Senate candidate Jason Kander compared Mr. Biden to a shopper who “realized he mistakenly failed to pay for an item in his cart” when he left a store and an alarm went off. Mr. Biden, the analogy goes, went back in and returned the items. By contrast, Mr. Trump apparently stuffed items in his pockets, and when the store alarm sounded “he ran to his car and peeled out.”

You could add to the Trump part of the analogy that he led the police on a low-speed pursuit, and then insisted the stolen items were his all along.

In the last two decades we have seen a broad spectrum of wrongdoing — both administrative and criminal — among high-ranking government officials, from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales bringing classified files home in his briefcase (in part because he forgot the combination to his office safe) to the C.I.A. director David Petraeus turning over notebooks with classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover, and the former National Security adviser Sandy Berger slipping records into his socks and other clothing to smuggle them out of the National Archives. Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in 2016, if you strip away the politics, was somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, trending more toward sloppy office management than national security threat.

If we apply the standards of Sandy Berger and David Petraeus (who were both prosecuted) versus Alberto Gonzales and Hillary Clinton (who were not), then Mr. Biden clearly falls on the noncriminal side, whereas Mr. Trump could get multiple criminal charges. Sure, Mr. Biden has made his situation harder because of ongoing revelations and bad communications to the media, but that only worsens his political problem, not any underlying criminal intent — nor does his behavior appear to rise to the legal standards of “willful retention” or “gross negligence.” Every sign we have thus far is that Mr. Biden notified the right people at the right time.

But for Mr. Trump, there’s a second wrinkle: He wasn’t a White House official, cabinet officer or intelligence chief. He was the president — and while Mr. Trump’s backers have argued that that gives him more leeway to hold onto classified records after his presidency, because he alone had the authority to declassify records and files (an argument that his backers have made in the press but that his lawyers have carefully avoided making under oath in court), the history of the presidency actually shows that Mr. Trump’s role in our government should be an aggravating factor in his case, not a mitigating one.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 was created and passed by Congress precisely to make impossible what Mr. Trump apparently tried to do: absconding with the legacy and records of a presidency that belong rightfully to the nation, not to an individual. Senator Sam Ervin helped drive passage of the legislation and other laws after Watergate to prevent Richard Nixon from destroying the tapes and records of his administration’s corruption and mendacity.

The history that happens inside the White House belongs to the nation — not to the people who work there. It’s a core principle of a country governed by the rule of law, not by men (and women).

In keeping documents that reportedly ranged from his letters with foreign leaders to potential nuclear secrets, Mr. Trump is accused of trying to steal America’s history — apparently with forethought. When confronted, he repeatedly resisted returning that history to its rightful owners for future generations.

Mr. Trump’s situation was always going to be a case that centered on so-called prosecutorial discretion — that is, the careful weighing of how investigators have handled defendants in similar cases, whether there’s evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred and whether justice is served by seeking criminal charges. (Mr. Petraeus’s case, for instance, was a major factor in the decision not to charge Ms. Clinton in 2016.)

It was never going to be cut and dried whether to charge a former president; the Watergate special counsel Leon Jaworski was in some ways grateful for Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon because it made moot his weighty decision of whether to pursue charges against Nixon.

Inadvertently, Mr. Biden’s scandal — while unfortunate politically — provides the counterexample that Mr. Garland and the special counsel Jack Smith, who is tasked with considering charges against Mr. Trump, can weigh to possibly show how Mr. Trump’s behavior advanced from a routine administrative matter to a criminal one. To date, one looks like an unfortunate political scandal while the other is a potential crime against the country.

Mr. Trump’s case isn’t just about classified material. At its core, it is about who controls America’s history.

He's been defending himself on Twitter all day, denying it of course. People are giving him hell because nobody believes a word he says anymore, that's what happens when you get caught in so many lies.

I did not say that snood and you know it. They don't play bullshit games, but they don't obfuscate over truth. We are the jury, we know the truth when we hear it. I also hope that moderate Republicans will see what is going on - their seats will be the most vulnerable.

Just glimpses. Do you think any of this social media condemnation will translate into him actually having to get the hell out of government?

Remember the iconic image of a smiling Joe Biden in his 1967 Corvette Stingray? It conjured charming Uncle Joe, a retro-cool guy who’d been around the track and knew how to handle it.

Four months after President Biden called Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents “irresponsible,” that vintage car — parked at the president’s home in Delaware next to his own boxes containing classified material — has been transformed into a shiny symbol of hypocrisy. If you went into a G.O.P. whataboutism lab and asked for a perfect gaffe, you’d come out with the president snapping last week to a Fox News reporter, “My Corvette is in a locked garage.”

Well, the storage room at Mar-a-Lago is locked, too.

Just two weeks ago, Democrats were chortling over chaos in the G.O.P., convinced that far-right Republican control of the House would help them in 2024. Then they experienced the exquisite torture that comes with the slow release of politically damaging information, in this case the acknowledgment of classified documents found in Mr. Biden’s former offices and Wilmington home. Now he’s fully in the barrel — targeted by powerful congressional committees, aggressive reporters looking for scoops and a methodical new special counsel, Robert Hur, to match Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump.

The optical equivalence between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden is phony, of course. Mr. Trump is a grifter who appears to have intentionally taken hundreds of classified documents, bragging that he kept the folders marked “classified” or “confidential” as “‘cool’ keepsakes.” He said of his stash of classified documents, according to several advisers, “It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” and seemingly defied a subpoena to return the documents, thereby exposing him to possible prosecution for obstruction of justice. Mr. Biden, by contrast, was sloppy and slow to search for and disclose the existence of about 20 stray classified documents but is fully cooperating with authorities.

Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, this distinction cannot easily survive the miasma of congressional and special counsel subpoenas, relentless questions from reporters and fresh allegations of impropriety that signal the arrival of a new episodic political drama. Many voters with better things to do with their time than parse the nuances of presidential record keeping may casually conclude that both men are careless, lying politicians.

On one level, the classified documents imbroglio is just an acrimonious prelude to the 2024 campaign, a story that will surface, disappear, then surface again with tiresome predictability. But Mr. Biden’s new problems run deeper than that. They represent both a challenge to his core political brand of honor and decency and the start of a more intense, potentially combative period of scrutiny for a president poised to seek re-election. All of which suggests that we may look back on January of 2023 as the end of a relatively brief era in American political life — a period, for all its turmoil, when two Democratic presidents avoided being enmeshed in the grinding machinery of scandal that has otherwise characterized Washington for half a century.

All 10 American presidencies since 1973 have faced investigation by a special counsel or independent prosecutor, except one: Barack Obama’s. For eight years, Mr. Obama and his vice president and other high-ranking officials were seen as figures of unusual rectitude, and the impression of integrity returned when Mr. Biden took office after four years of wall-to-wall corruption. But now this sharp ethical contrast with Mr. Trump has been dulled. That complicates the president’s expected re-election campaign — and could even short-circuit it.

Most Democrats still think Mr. Biden is honest, and they view his accomplishments on the economy, climate, infrastructure and defending democracy as far more significant than this lapse. But it’s hard to exaggerate the level of Democratic exasperation with him for squandering a huge political advantage on the Mar-a-Lago story and for muddying what may have been the best chance to convict Mr. Trump on federal charges. Mr. Biden’s more serious problem may be with independents, whom he carried by nine points in 2020. Unforced errors can take a toll with them. Even as the classified documents story eventually fades — it will most likely not be a first-tier issue next year — swing voters may see him in a harsher light.

To understand why, it’s necessary to look back more than a dozen years. From the first moments of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Republicans attacked him for everything from having been born in Kenya (a racist lie pushed by Mr. Trump, among others) to wearing tan suits. Even when it distracted Mr. Obama, he brushed it all off his shoulders.

That’s because the Obama-Biden administration set an exceptionally high ethical standard and usually met it. Mr. Obama’s scandal-less White House liked to keep things “tight,” as he put it — sometimes too tight. If any appointee stepped out of line, the response was often to fire first and ask questions later, as Shirley Sherrod, a Black official at the Agriculture Department, learned in 2010 after Fox News aired a highly edited tape taken from a right-wing website that made it seem she had delivered a racist speech to the N.A.A.C.P. Ms. Sherrod’s remarks were in fact taken badly out of context, but by the time this was recognized, she had already been dismissed. (The agency subsequently offered to rehire her.)

Essentially all Obama-era “scandals” collapsed under scrutiny or never touched his White House. Oceans of ink were spilled chronicling the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel company that received loan guarantees from the Energy Department. But no improper conduct was ever established, and the overall loan guarantee program actually turned a profit for the government. Likewise, a poorly planned and ill-fated sting at the U.S.-Mexico border called Operation Fast and Furious brought inconclusive congressional hearings and a contempt citation for Attorney General Eric Holder but did not tarnish Mr. Obama.

Mr. Biden’s vulnerabilities are closer to home. His allies are reportedly claiming the story will blow over because it’s just D.C. noise, but that was not Hillary Clinton’s experience with her emails and server. In the same way that the grueling Benghazi hearings from 2014 through 2016 softened Mrs. Clinton up for later attacks, the Biden documents story may give new life to unproven allegations about his connections to unsavory Chinese executives in business with members of his family. Did foreign nationals have access to the mishandled classified documents? That’s highly unlikely. But Republican lawmakers will use Democratic charges about security breaches at Mar-a-Lago as an excuse to open outlandish lines of inquiry.

And the G.O.P. now has subpoena power to delve into red-meat targets like the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and any communications on it that involved the current president. James Comer, the new chair of the House Oversight Committee, will almost certainly haul Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden, the president’s brother, before the committee to testify about their suspiciously lucrative deals with foreign firms and the way their business intersected disastrously with Hunter Biden’s squalid personal life.

To navigate the coming storm, Joe Biden needs to up his political game — no small feat for a man of his age — and avoid becoming his own worst enemy. First, he will have to keep his famous temper out of public view. If Uncle Joe morphs into Testy Joe, over his son or his handling of classified documents or anything else, his problems will worsen. Beyond an improving economy and a successful conclusion to the war in Ukraine, the best medicine for his political ailments would be a surprising legislative victory. In the new Congress, 18 House Republicans represent districts that Mr. Biden carried in 2020. If Mr. Biden can persuade just a handful of them to vote against defaulting on the national debt and sending the global economy into a depression — a harder task than it sounds because of all-but-inevitable right-wing primary challenges — he’ll get credit for averting a major economic crisis.

But even if Mr. Biden puts wins on the board, survives venomous Republican lawmakers and gets off with a slap on the wrist in the special counsel’s report, the classified documents story has likely stripped him of a precious political asset with some independents and Democrats: the benefit of the doubt. The general feeling that Mr. Biden — like Mr. Obama — is clean and scandal-free has been replaced by the normal Washington assumption of some level of guilt.

Republicans are ferocious attack dogs, especially when they have something to chew on. And Mr. Biden, a better president than candidate, has never had the nimbleness necessary for good defense. When he first ran for president in 1988, he was forced to withdraw amid minor charges of plagiarism that a more dexterous politician might have survived. Over the years, his skills on the stump deteriorated. He performed poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020 and recovered in South Carolina and won the nomination only because Democrats concluded en masse that he was the best candidate to beat Mr. Trump.

That remains the prevailing assumption inside the Democratic Party: He did it before and can do it again. But it’s not clear that rank-and-file voters agree. Last year a New York Times/Siena College poll showed nearly two-thirds of Democrats didn’t want Mr. Biden to run. While his standing improved after the midterms, he’s down in the first polls released since the documents story broke.

The president is now an elderly swimmer in a sea of sharks. And some of them may even be Democrats. It’s not hard to envision an ambitious primary challenger arguing, more in sorrow than in anger, that he or she supports most of the Biden record but elections are about the future and the party needs a more vigorous candidate. (Mr. Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.) Democratic leaders will be shocked and appalled by the upstart’s temerity in spoiling the party’s impressive unity. But New Hampshire is full of anti-establishment independents, and basically the entire state is furious with Mr. Biden for proposing to bump its primary to the second week of the schedule. He could easily lose or be weakened there, opening the door for other Democrats. Which ones? That’s what primaries are for.

In the meantime, the president isn’t looking good in polls pitting him against Republicans in hypothetical 2024 matchups. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have been running about even, a depressing finding for Democrats. And if the G.O.P. nominates a younger candidate like Ron DeSantis, Mr. Biden could be the octogenarian underdog in the general election.

Imagine instead that the president takes a leaf from Nancy Pelosi and decides not to run. Mr. Comer and the clownish members of his committee would probably end up training most of their fire on Democrats not named Biden. Democrats would “turn the page,” as Mr. Obama recommended in 2008, to a crop of fresher candidates, probably governors, who contrast better with Mr. Trump and would have good odds of beating a younger Republican. And the smiling old gentleman in the Corvette — his shortcomings forgotten and his family protected — would assume his proper place as a bridge between political generations and arguably the most accomplished one-term president in American history.