Biden Has His Defenders, Even as Fox News Jumps on 'Garagegate'
Biden Has His Defenders, Even as Fox News Jumps on 'Garagegate'
Effort to prevent false equivalency between Biden, Trump documents cases
Elected Democrats and others continue to stand behind President Biden in the midst of the developing case in which he was found to be in unauthorized possession of federal documents.
Much of their effort appears aimed at fighting any sense of false equivalency between Biden's situation, and that of Donald Trump's willful hording of hundreds of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, for which the former president remains under federal criminal investigation.
News emerged this week that staff working for Biden found government documents packed away at a former office Biden was using, as well as a couple of other locations, including a locked garage at his Wilmington, Del., home.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the Biden matter.
The news of the documents found with Biden — dating from his term as vice president — has sparked outrage on the political right, with charges of a double standard between Biden and Trump.
But that's not actually true, according to a chorus of Democrats, commentators and others.
In the Biden case, his team reportedly immediately contacted the National Archives and turned over all the documents found. The National Archives hadn't even known those documents were missing.
However, Trump had held onto a large number of boxes of sensitive and classified materials and obstructed their return, even after the National Archives had a subpoena for the former president to turn them over.
The result was the stunning FBI execution of a search warrant last summer at Mar-a-Lago to recover the documents.
“Jake, we don’t expect our leaders to be perfect. We do expect our leaders to have character and integrity. Obviously, people made mistakes. Documents should not be in a private residence or outside of the agencies. But the point is that the president is showing character,” Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif) said in an interview with CNN host Jake Tapper. “He is cooperating fully. He is not attacking the Justice Department. He’s respecting the independence of the process. And I think people will look at this and say, 'Look, this is why we elected him.’”
Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, was even more explicit in drawing the contrast between the Biden and Trump documents cases.
“Politically for Democrats, the obvious immediate reaction here is ‘Ugh, are you serious? Democrats were on such a roll. Republicans are now going to pounce on this, ugh.’ This downplays the significance of the Trump document scandal, right? I would suggest not so much, not so much at all,” Brzezinski said, on-camera. “Classified documents in private hands is something Republicans downplayed constantly until the shoe was placed on the other foot.
“And unfortunately for them, the Trump shoe that dropped was much bigger and entirely different in the key issue of willful intent to obstruct. That’s what it’s going to come down to,” she added.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made much the same point, saying: “I think the Biden folks, as I said, cooperated with the prosecutorial authorities from Day One and Donald Trump didn’t.”
Meanwhile, right-wing media — including Fox News — is going in the opposite direction with the story, with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy suggesting that the president not return to a “potential crime scene” at his Wilmington home.
Doocy had, just a day earlier, dubbed the Biden documents case “Garagegate.”
“But there was a good two years in there where he was just a retired statesman,” Doocy added, on-camera, referring to Biden. “And that house, we know, did not have Secret Service protection.
“He said it’s in a locked garage with a car. What does that look like? We know that the Bidens travel a lot, especially Joe Biden. He was one of 2018’s biggest surrogates. When he would go out of town, who was watching the garage?” Doocy added. “And is it a setup that is satisfactory to protecting America’s secrets? We don’t know what this document is. It’s possible that we won’t know, because it might be too classified, but officials here are just pointing us to this process that is playing out.”
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