Why Isn’t Joe Biden in Trouble? The big news this morning is Donald Trump’s federal indictment over his handling of classified documents.
The indictment raises several questions – some of which are immediate (what was Trump charged with?) and some of which will linger to haunt the 2024 presidential campaign (will the other GOP candidates promise a Trump-pardon on the campaign trail?).
But the indictment also raises some peripheral questions, like, whatever happened to Joe Biden’s classified documents snafu? Is that investigation still ongoing? And if Trump was charged criminally, can Biden be, too?
Biden’s own documents investigation
Trump wasn’t the only one discovered with classified documents in his possession. While Trump had over 300 classified documents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago residence/resort, Biden also had documents recovered from his former office in Washington, D.C. and from his home in Delaware (for the record, Mike Pence also had documents recovered from his Indiana home).
The Department of Justice is leading an investigation into the classified documents recovered from Biden. Special counsel Robert Hur is running the case.
The left-leaning mainstream media has been very careful to draw distinctions between the Trump case and the Biden case.
One of the distinctions being made relates to quantity. With Biden, for example, attorneys only found a “small number” of classified documents (about ten), in an office that Biden used from 2017 to 2020 at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. More documents were pulled from Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Another distinction relates to cooperation. “After the classified materials were discovered at Biden’s former offices, Biden attorneys immediately contacted the White House counsel’s office,” USA Today reported. Trump on the other hand, as the narrative goes, made efforts to obstruct FBI efforts to recover the documents.
Will Joe Biden be indicted?
I don’t know the specifics of the investigation, I don’t know what Hur is looking at behind closed doors, but I have a suspicion that Biden will not be indicted on anything related to his possession of classified documents. This is pure speculation on my part, completely a hunch, so don’t take it to the bank – but I would be surprised if Biden were charged with federal crimes.
Let’s consider a scenario in which Biden is not charged.
If Biden is not charged there will be an uproar from roughly half the populace demanding to know why Trump was charged and Biden was not for a fact pattern that to many people seem indiscernible. The distinctions being raised in the press today – quantity and cooperation – will not assuage the masses who believe Trump is being unfairly targeted.
Exacerbating the idea that a double-standard is being applied between the former and current president, is the simple fact that Biden currently runs the DOJ. So, in the event that Trump is charged and Biden is not, you’ll have people pointing out that Biden’s DOJ did not charge Joe Biden but that Biden’s DOJ did charge Biden’s main political rival.
Now if that did happen – Trump is charged and Biden is not – it would be because of some nuance in the law. The explanation, the distinction, would be esoteric and technical, and in my best estimation, would fail to resonate with most people.
Instead, I suspect most people would lock into the simple fact I’ve outlined above: Biden runs the DOJ, the DOJ did not charge Biden, and the DOJ did charge Biden’s main political rival. That’s going to be tough to explain away with legal nuance.
Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
From 19FortyFive
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