The Biden Classified Documents Story Is Why People Hate Politics

Two things can be true at once about this week’s revelation that classified documents were found in a locked closet at a think tank office used by President Joe Biden after his vice presidency and before his election in 2020.

First, as former federal prosecutor Shan Wu argued here at The Daily Beast, the circumstances—such as we know of them so far—do seem legitimately different from those surrounding the recovery of classified documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property last year.

But second, the fact that this happened in early November, right before the midterms, and neither the White House nor the Department of Justice informed the public for more than two months…well, it’s pretty hard to see how that’s not blatantly corrupt.

Not legally corrupt, perhaps. I don’t know of any statute the Biden administration violated in this delay. But unless there’s some enormous mitigating factor the White House has, for some mysterious reason, declined to explain, the moral corruption is glaring.

To all appearances, we’re just learning about this now because it might have been bad for Democrats in the election, undercutting their arguments about Trump’s unmatched dishonesty and threat to American democracy. And while that might explain why Biden didn’t sing the news from the rooftops, it’s no excuse for the semi-independent DOJ.