Commentary
Every president probably stashes away classified documents. The chances of any president being successfully prosecuted for pilfering them are infinitesimal. Nevertheless, Joe Biden has engaged in the same behavior as Donald Trump—perhaps worse, since vice presidents are unable to declassify documents—and precedent and transparency, our very democracy, demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland name a special counsel to investigate.
Right now, none of the rationalizations offered by the media for Biden’s actions over the past few days work anymore. When the story first broke, outlets stressed that one of the vital “distinctions” between the two incidents was that Biden was in possession of fewer documents than Trump. Biden aides, we learned, had been utterly shocked to discover only a “small number” of classified documents “locked” in the personal offices of the president’s “think tank”—as if the location or the number of documents, or the alleged lock, rather than the contents, were the most newsworthy aspect of the story….