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The Biden document story is a nothingburger

WARNING! As you probably know, a few classified documents were found last year in Joe Biden's old office while it was being cleaned out. The National Archives was immediately informed and the documents were all turned over. For some reason, though, the story only broke yesterday.

Lots of Democrats are now in a panic over the possibility that the media will "bothsides" this, pretending that Biden's minor document mistake is equivalent to the hundreds of classified documents that Donald Trump stole and then refused to return until they were uncovered via search warrant and he was forced to turn them over.

DON'T PANIC! It's only been a day. So far the Biden story has merely been reported, as it ought to be, and as I write this it's already nothing more than a tiny blurb far below the fold in every major newspaper. By tomorrow it will probably be gone.

Why do I think this? (1) Every article I've read goes to great lengths to acknowledge that the Trump and Biden affairs have almost nothing in common. (2) There's no reason to think that any further documents will be found, which would have provided the drip-drip-drip that stories like this need to stay alive. (3) It's big news on CNN and Fox, but only because cable news is voracious for this kind of stuff. They'll both move on before long. (4) Even Republicans probably won't bother too much with it. It's not much of a story, and anyway, they've got bigger fish to fry (Hunter Biden's laptop, the Chinese lab origin of COVID-19, anti-Trump corruption in the FBI, the invasion of America by illegal immigrants, etc.).

NO WORRIES, MATE! Unless someone uncovers something truly damning—which is unlikely in the extreme—this story will die very soon. In the meantime, the best thing we can all do is ignore it.

31 thoughts on “The Biden document story is a nothingburger

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  1. different_name

    Oh, come on. You know exactly where this is going.

    McCarthy staffers are already preparing the committee in anticipation of the Insurrection Caucus ordering him to get on with it.

    1. cmayo

      Yep. This is going to occupy the entire "investigative" schedule for 2023 for the House. We're never going to hear the end of it.

  2. Salamander

    I hope you're right, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Nothingburgers are the favorite meal of Republican witch hunters. Because, if there were something there, the judicial system would have gotten involved.

    Speaking of which (witch?), how's the great Nothingburger Poll? Has it achieved cromulence yet?

    1. memyselfandi

      The judicial system is involved. The justice department has already said they have opened a preliminary investigation and are investigating if there is a need for a special counsel.

      1. Salamander

        Of course, you're right. However, if and when the Justice Department decides it isn't worth prosecuting, Jim Jordan will still rip off his jacket and begin cavorting all over the hearing room. For two more years. At least.

  3. jte21

    It's already holy writ on the right that Biden is a barely-sentient, senile trainwreck. How can you hold someone like that responsible for not remembering some paperwork in a desk in their old office?

  4. Yikes

    Oh, au contraire, we will never hear the end of it if "we" are hearing of it from any source as to which a Republican has anything to say about it.

    It does illustrate why Trump is still walking around, free as a daisy though.

    Trump has this sixth sense of knowing exactly how far he can go before he actually pays any penalty, which to my knowledge has been never. And part of this sixth sense is he knows what alleged billionaires can get away with as opposed to regular joes (for example, regular people pay a price for not paying bills, wealthy business owners stiff contractors regularly).

    Basically, Trump knows that if you read the cards right, almost no penalty is ever imposed on a "crime of omission." Like, as long as you don't personally hack the DNC emails, you can easily "omit" the part where you state that such material should not be used, and frankly, encourage the people who stole them to use them. Basically, you are omitting the part where you do the correct thing.

    Like omitting the part about doing a diligent search to return documents. Nothing is going to happen to the jackass in chief.

    Also covered, is the part where you can encourage all sorts of bad action once you are a politician. Think about it, conceptually. You can always say, "I didn't really want anyone to do anything violent, I just meant rhetorically." Even though you admit that part. Like "go march up there and fight like hell." You can omit the next sentence "peacefully of course."

  5. jte21

    I don't even think we know yet 1. whether Biden himself was the one who left them there, and 2. what level these were classified at. Classification merely means there is *some kind* of restricted access to the material, and that can run the gamut from it being limited to, say, just the people who work in a particular office or agency, all the way up to basically the country's most closely guarded national security secrets. Since Biden and the people working around him aren't naifs and idiots who would, say, remove TS/Compartmented natsec papers from the Oval Office and leave them lying around a Palm Beach supper club, my bet is that they're relatively innocuous, banal documents with no natsec significance whatsoever and which were left there unintentionally by someone who nonethelesss had legal authority to see them.

    IOW, a nothingburger. Not that Republicans won't try to turn it into a 5-alarm shitshow anyway like they do with everything, but still.

    1. memyselfandi

      There was a least one document that was TS/SCI. Though very few people correctly note that some categories of information can only be SCI or not classified and never anywhere in between. i.e. TS/SCI can be of very minimal sensitivity and even should not be classified. Also, we need to know if these were unique records or are they all copies of records the government already has. (If they're not unique then Biden can't be accused of stealing them as Trump did with the records he took.)
      This really does need to be taken seriously (which the feds ae doing, asking a trump appointed US attorney to investigate) and a good explanation of why this is not criminal, if it is not, must be provided. (It is in fact quite easy to hypothesis a non damaging explanation for Joe. For example, regular government staff, say secret service or CIA was tasked with decommissioning a SCIF at Biden's Delaware residence when he was leaving the vice presidency. Part of that job includes securing and retrieving all classified documents. They missed the documents, i.e. the blame belongs to some buck private. At some point, all of the documents from presidents bidens time as vice president at his residence were gathered up ad transported to his new university office. No one noticed or looked into the file these documents were in at that point. Not saying this happened, just a scenario where Biden wouldn't be in trouble.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      Well, uh, yeah. But most of those 'low info voters' are Trumpers and they'll latch onto the smallest similarity to make a false equivalence just so they can 'both sides do it.'

  6. azumbrunn

    If I were not too lazy I would look in the archives for Kevin's "Benghazi" is going nowhere" and "Hillary e-mails are a nothing burger" posts....

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        And he was right. There was an attempt to make something out of them, but it went nowhere.

        If gifting the White House to Donald Trump is "going nowhere" in your book, fine.

  7. Dana Decker

    Biden is in the clear *unless* pictures of Celine Dion were found mixed in with classified documents at his office.

  8. Batchman

    Still, it's suspicious that this event, which occurred last November 2, didn't appear in the news until just now, safely after the midterm elections and House speaker election. Unless you're saying that some nasty Republicans planted the item, which I sincerely doubt.

    1. ColBatGuano

      It's only suspicious if you're looking to gin up a controversy where none exists. Were they supposed to immediately run to the press to announce this before any investigation had taken place? Maybe Biden should have just immediately resigned or all Democratic candidates should have conceded to their opponents in the midterms? And how does this affect the Speaker election?

  9. Pingback: About that nothingburger . . . – Kevin Drum

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