On August 15 last, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago documents case broke, I wrote “I remain convinced that Merrick Garland has evidence of some sort showing that Trump intends or intended to monetize those documents in some way.” It seemed obvious to me that the very first time in American history that a former president was charged with a crime, it would have to be something serious and not simply a matter of having some documents he should not have kept. Now, it may turn out that Merrick Garland has some evidence of genuinely treasonous behavior and is just keeping it very quiet, but I have to confess I have not seen the slightest evidence of it.
And now it turns out the good old Joe also took some
classified documents home with them and stuck them in a closet. I know, I know,
the cases are very different. Well they
may be legally but politically the documents case is dead now unless Trump really
did try to sell them and Garland can prove it.
I never placed much store in the documents case anyway. But
the Fulton County, Georgia case is something else again. I would be willing to
bet that the DA is going to indict Trump and a bunch of other people as well
and with that phone call that we have all heard a million times, I suspect she
will get convictions. The news is not all bad on a cloudy Thursday morning.
9 comments:
A question or two: do you regard the uncovering of Biden's possession of the documents as politically motivated by scandal seeking lawyer or an overly scrupulous democrat?
Do you think McCarthy will go after Biden? You know that Trump probably did the same thing as President and it was covered up or ignored because of Trump's venality and the Republican's vileness?
Will this as a colleague said make Biden a lame duck?
These are my cluttered questions
I think it is a stupid unforced error. The moment the mar-a- Lago documents case broke, Biden should have sent aides to search every place he could possibly have been to find any documents that were there and should have turned them over six months ago. I do not think it will make Biden a lame-duck. My guess is he is going to have a very good next year and will look to be in good shape by the time the primary season comes around. That is just my guess
This coworker who dismissed Biden as a lame duck, would rather debate your son on the Benko Gambit than debate you on the life left on the Benko Gambit
The natural question to pose would be: how must Biden and the Democrats play their hand, on the Biden investigation and the so-called Republican House and everything?
If Biden were a great leader and not just (maybe) wise and smart (sometimes) what would he do?
The terrain of battle has shifted as it does in war- chto delet Joe?
life left in White House that is
My bad
The point is not so much that Trump *had* the documents but that he had his lawyers fight giving them back for months, to the point that FBI agents had to execute a search warrant at Mar a Lago.
The notion that this alone will cause Biden to be a lame duck is nonsense. No one really gives a sh*t about his having some documents with classified markings in the locked garage where he keeps his Corvette. The documents being there probably poses as much of a threat to 'national security' as his Corvette does.
Yes LFC
Part of the electorate, like the MAGA base and maybe some independents do care.
Reasonable people like you could care less, but there are people out there who think that the election was stolen and they were put on the defensive- those people have ammunition.
For people who are discerning sure, Biden did nothing that damning.
Who says the body politic is reasonable?
The partisan hackery and rationalization on display here are amusing and predictable.
The cases are clearly v different insofar as Trump didn't cooperate with the authorities and tried (and afaik is still trying) to argue that he had acted entirely properly. But it is clearly clumsy and foolish by Biden, at best.
I honestly don't understand how these guys get in these positions, they shouldn't be able to take these documents home at all; this (printing out confidential documents and taking them home) would be unacceptable nowadays even in a business context with far less sensitive material. If you're president or vice president and reviewing classified documents on the move then you should be handed them by an official, who should then take them away again when you are done.
Rollo
I would just point out that these cases arise from their taking documents as they left their government positions, not from taking them home when they were still in office (although in Trump's case home and office were basically in the same place, i.e. the White House). Doesn't excuse it, of course.
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