By In November, Democrats were flying high. They’d expanded their majority in the Senate, nearly kept the House of Representatives, and President Biden looked to be turning around his disastrous first two years in office.
Boy, do things change quickly in Washington.
In the wake of the latest Biden scandal in which classified documents were found at his various private offices, Democrats are once again feeling uneasy. As they look at 2024, they fear that Biden’s success will collapse as his alleged corruption threatens his re-election chances.
The Hill writes, While Democrats say they remain confident that Biden can overcome the problem, they say the disclosure of numerous batches of classified documents complicates matters for the president ahead of his campaign launch.
Privately, they wonder how tough it will be for Biden to explain what happened and draw comparisons to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, in which the former secretary of State admitted to using a private email account while doing government business.
It also gives Republicans a gift by complicating Democratic attacks on former President Trump over the FBI’s search of his Florida residence, where classified documents were seized in August 2022.
“This is going to be a pretty big problem for the president,” said one Democratic strategist who asked that their name be withheld to speak candidly about the issue. “Republicans have always been good at drumming up scandal and even though the situation here with Biden is completely different than the situation involving Trump, they’re going to act like this is a huge deal.”
The latest chapter in the classified documents scandal has shown that Biden appears to be hiding who has accessed the papers he took with him after leaving the White House, especially the ones he was hiding near his Corvette. Fox News reports, “There are no visitor logs for President Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, the White House Counsel’s Office said in a Monday statement.
Republicans on Capitol Hill demanded the visitor logs this weekend following revelations that Biden’s lawyers had discovered a stash of classified documents inside the home’s garage. While it is common practice to keep comprehensive visitor logs at the White House, Biden’s lawyers say no such record exists for his home in Delaware.
‘Like every President in decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,’ the White House Counsel’s Office told Fox News Digital on Monday. ‘But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.’
The White House Counsel’s Office searched Biden’s two Delaware residences in Rehoboth Beach and Wilmington last week after news of the first documents broke. White House lawyers say they immediately contacted the DOJ when they discovered the documents inside Biden’s Wilmington garage. There has been no indication of what the documents contain or whether Biden or anyone else read them after he left office as vice president.”
The problem for the White House is that everyone knows how the Biden Family leverages their power to rake in millions of dollars. “It’s his private residence” is no different from “Hunter Biden happens to make millions as an artist now.”
The Democrats have two problems while facing this scandal—Biden’s shadiness and the complete incompetence of those he’s hired as staff.
The president has had trouble telling the truth over his long career. He can’t help himself. When he can make up a story, he always will. The most recent fib involved him saying he attended a Black Church while he was younger.
BIDEN: "I used to go to 7:30 mass every morning in high school and then in college, before I went to the Black church. Not a joke."
Congregants say they can't recall Biden ever attending. pic.twitter.com/4xcF6i0nFE
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 15, 2023
Biden might be a serial sophist, but his staff isn’t up to the task of defending him, either. Matt Vespa at Townhall has argued that the press secretary, Karine Jean Pierre, is not up to the task and it’s starting to kill her party.
He writes, “After the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago last summer over Trump possessing classified materials, there was much moral grandstanding from Democrats, Joe Biden, and the media. In January of 2023, Joe Biden was caught with troves of classified materials at multiple locations, including his residence in Wilmington, Delaware. Mar-a-Lago is protected by the Secret Service and staffed by those with proper security clearances—it’s a secure location. The issue was the process, and whether Trump followed proper protocols since serving as president of the United States, the Donald could declassify anything.
Joe wasn’t afforded that privilege as vice president under Obama. Some of the files were in his garage. And after Karine Jean Pierre declared the search for more Biden documents had concluded, more sensitive materials were found inside the Wilmington home. It’s a circus, and these files were also labeled ‘top secret.’ Biden has earned a special counsel investigation, along with Democrats infuriated that the moral high ground has been lost. It also means that Trump isn’t going to get indicted for mishandling classified materials, which was always a long shot since the office of the presidency has near-universal declassification powers.
There’s no defense for this, and it’s not a cakewalk. Any press secretary would be roasting from the heat hurled upon them by the press. It doesn’t help that the Biden White House refuses to explain why JoRo decided to leave the Obama administration with documents he could not possess. Democrats demand something to explain this fiasco—their strategists are also tossing around a new protocol: appoint a special spokesperson to handle all inquiries about Biden’s classified document circus.”
Jean Pierre’s mistakes have begun to frustrate Democrats. CBS News noted, “Over the course of the week, West Wing staffers, officials across the Biden administration and Democratic Party officials more broadly expressed frustration to CBS News with how the White House has explained to the general public the discovery of documents with classified markings at President Biden’s former office and his home in Delaware.
Those who spoke to CBS News, who were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the situation and not upset their professional relationships, believe the decision not to disclose the discovery of the documents sooner undercuts the president’s precious vows of transparency and professional management of the government.
‘They’re trying to put lipstick on a pig,’ one Democrat close to the White House said Friday. ‘The problem is this week they got handed 50 pigs and one stick of lipstick.’
Another Democrat who advised Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and has worked in campaign politics across the South and West for decades described the situation now facing the president as ‘hypocritical,’ given Mr. Biden’s past denunciations of Trump’s handling of classified information.”
The White House is running out of cards to play.
Vespa summarized the Democratic problem clearly: “You can’t fire Karine Grey Poupon due to the identity politics creed the Left has adopted with authoritarian gusto: you can’t fire the first black lesbian White House press secretary. It’s probably not a terrible idea, but it highlights how Karine can’t do the job. Like her boss, she hasn’t been able to perform her duties for months. Even top Democratic operatives and communications strategists know she’s low-caliber—it’s about managing this nightmare, and she can’t be QB1. Karine got bodied, but if you’re a Democrat, you need something because the line of questioning will be fierce this week, and everyone, not just Fox News, will be asking why Joe Biden was so reckless with state secrets.”
Can Biden right the ship two times in three months? Does anyone think he can? Or will Democrats again start fantasizing about running someone else in 2024.
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