The Associated Press "Both Sides" The Presidents' Classified Documents Scandals
According to the Associated Press (AP), which is bending over backwards to try and appear balanced, President Joe Biden’s “classified documents scandal” is basically the end of his presidency and the death knell for his future plans.
They could not be more off base.
The news service claimed Pres. Biden’s “political outlook veered into more uncertain territory” earlier this week when a small amount of classified documents were found in an office the president maintained.
No, it hasn’t.
While it’s not a great look for the President, the small amount of documents that were found do not rise to the level of obstruction and criminality that Donald Trump’s classified documents scandal does.
But the media would have you believe that the two are analogous. While both are bad, one of these things is not like the other.
“Democrats publicly and privately conceded that the stunning development was at best an unwelcome distraction at an inopportune time that muddies the case against Donald Trump,” the AP noted.
Ummm…no, it doesn’t. It doesn’t affect that case against Donald Trump in the slightest. One thing has nothing to do with the other.
Republicans and the media want you to think that just because the President and the former President have classified documents that were not turned over to the National Archives in a timely manner, that Donald Trump for some reason cannot be prosecuted for his crimes. The case should just be dropped and Pres. Biden should be hounded out of office.
This (as most things Republicans do) does not make any sense. Both cases are separate. Not related. Not analogous. Being looked into by separate Special Counsels. And will be adjudicated based on the separate facts.
The AP wrote: “As Democrats recoiled into a defensive posture, Trump's would-be Republican rivals in 2024 acknowledged that the contours of the upcoming race had shifted.”
Maybe they’d like to think so, but they haven’t. Nothing has changed. Donald Trump is still a sleazy, lying, con man, criminal. And Joe Biden is still a decent, empathetic competent person. This new “Democratic scandal” does not give Trump a leg up. Democrats are not “reconsidering” whether they think Biden should run again.
The Democrats quoted in the AP article are basically “never Bidens.” They didn’t want him to run in the first place. This is just another excuse for them to pile on Biden because of his age. They think the Democratic Party needs new blood. There’s an argument to be made for that, but this “scandal” is not a catalyst.
“Some Democrats were hopeful, but not certain, that voters might distinguish between Biden's cooperative approach involving a small trove of documents he apparently possessed by mistake and what federal prosecutors described as Trump's willful obstruction of hundreds of government secrets,” the AP noted.
The election is just under two years away. This “scandal” will be well over by then. The Special Counsel will find no wrongdoing on Biden’s part and the “scandal” will fade away. If Biden is primaried, his opponents will try to make something out of this. But it will come to nothing. And Democratic voters will not use this as an excuse not to vote for Biden.
This one, tiny, almost non-existent scandal will not negate all that Biden has done in the past two years and all he will do in the next.
Sure it’s a black mark on his presidency, but it’s not a deal breaker. It was a stupid mistake by a staffer, not a willful criminal act by a grifting narcissist.
The American people and the Democrats will get over it.
The media should too.