Did Joe Biden just “lawyer up”?: A member of Congress tweeted over the weekend that the president has hired a lawyer, and that this is a sign of major scandal. But neither of those things appears to be true.
What Is Joe Biden Doing?
Strange doings on a Sunday morning. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who during the Obama Administration was chairman of the House Oversight Committee, tweeted what sounded like some big news about President Joe Biden:
“Joe Biden has officially lawyered up. This is what a real scandal looks like.”
It’s a strange tweet for a couple of reasons: There was nothing in the news, in recent days or weeks, about President Biden hiring a new lawyer. A Fox News story stated that Biden spent the weekend at Camp David with his son Hunter, and quoted a Twitter user as stating that the president and son were “with their lawyers” during their time at Camp David. However, there doesn’t appear to be anything in any legitimate reporting stating that the weekend was a legal strategy meeting, much less that the president has brought in any new lawyers.
In January, a CBS News story named Bob Bauer, a “longtime Biden legal hand,” as the leader of Biden’s current legal team, at least as it pertains to the federal investigation of Biden’s handling of classified documents. Bauer, a longtime top Washington lawyer, was counsel for the Obama campaign in 2008, and later White House counsel for two years in the Obama Administration.
So clearly, Joe Biden had a lawyer already. Indeed, every president for the last several decades has had at least one personal lawyer, and a president being represented by an attorney is far from shocking or scandalous.
Contrary to that, the replies and quote-tweets to Issa’s tweet indicate that the president has “lawyered up” is a sign that Biden is in major trouble, and if he did nothing wrong and had nothing to hide, why would the president need to have a lawyer? There are also more far-flung conspiracy theories, such as that Biden’s legal troubles represent the first step in a Deep State or Democratic conspiracy to replace Joe Biden on the presidential ticket.
This is, of course, not how things work in the legal system. Hiring a lawyer is not a sign of guilt. And for a president to do it does not represent the end of their presidency.
Take, for example, Donald Trump. He has been represented by lawyers in just about every stage of his political career. He cycled through an abnormally large coterie of lawyers during the Mueller investigation, as well as during his two impeachments, to the point where there was once a popular podcast called “All the President’s Lawyers.” The Washington Post recently put the number of attorneys who have represented Trump since 2016 in the dozens.
Trump’s lawyers are frequently in the news for high-profile reasons, often as a result of their splits with Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, went to prison and later became a huge Trump critic. Ty Cobb, a Trump lawyer from the Mueller era, has emerged as a frequent critic following Trump’s indictment, while the actions of Evan Corcoran, who represented Trump after he left office, were at the center of his federal indictment in the documents case. John Eastman, an attorney who has been accused of being the architect of Trump’s plans to overturn the 2020 election, recently faced a hearing in which he was threatened with the loss of his law license.
More recently, two attorneys quit Trump’s team the day after he was indicted in federal court, and the difficulty the former president has had in finding a new attorney to represent him in the federal case has been a relatively major news story in recent weeks.
None of the people who believe that Biden’s hypothetical hiring of a new lawyer is a sign of surefire guilt seem to feel the same way about Trump’s endless cycling of attorneys.
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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