It’s hard to shake the sense that Joe Biden’s classified document scandal, like Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago saga, is a lot of hype. Trump’s “crime” turned out to be a lot more trivial than the breathless whispers and leaks suggested. It turns out Trump was keeping presidential records as personal trophies, which is just about the least surprising thing ever. It’s unclear what Biden was doing with White House papers in his house, but unless there was some malicious or pecuniary interest, is it really such a big deal?
Many have speculated that there is something more going on, that Democrats are taking Biden out, like yesterday’s trash.
If the Justice Department can pick and choose the president, then we don’t really have a “democracy” at all but an oligarchy with a Praetorian guard. Of course, many suspect this has been the case for some time. We all saw how Trump was sandbagged with a bogus criminal probe into Russian “collusion,” and the witch-hunt is ongoing. It’s worth considering whether the Justice Department, by going after Biden, is creating a pretense of fairness to justify indicting Trump. This would be a truly egregious interference in the democratic process.
Some factions of the Left and Right might be happy with an outcome where both Trump and Biden go down. But if anyone is going to get shafted, it’s probably Trump. After all, we have seen this movie before. When Hillary Clinton kept classified information on a private email server, she got a slap on the wrist, but when Trump ran afoul of the same laws, he got an FBI raid. The question “When will the FBI raid Biden’s home?” answers itself.
In response to charges of unfairness, the Left spins a narrative about “false equivalences,” which is their way of saying it’s different when we do it. We can see their lawfare specialists already playing up the “obstruction” angle, like they did after Russiagate fell apart, to ignore the basic fact that Trump and Biden have been accused of the same underlying offense.
Watergate is why it is now a “crime” for a president to possess his own classified records in the first place. It’s proven a pretty stupid crime—seldom enforced except to inflict political damage to diminish the president and, therefore, the people—all while empowering unelected archivists and lawmen. The actual motive of the Watergate break-in has never been well established, but the overblown, much mythologized “cover-up” lives on as the central conceit of the modern journalist, who imagines himself a hero of Our Democracy™ as he prints whatever gossip he is given by well-placed spooks in the intelligence agencies.
Richard Nixon was the first president to be forced out of power by permanent Washington and the media, after winning reelection in the biggest landslide in U.S. history, no less. Is Biden getting the Watergate treatment? The media’s sudden interest in the contents of his Delaware garage feels disingenuous, given all of the corruption they have overlooked until now. The press continues to ignore a trove of evidence that the Biden family has gotten rich by selling America to the highest bidder. What is the Penn Biden Center, exactly, and what has this “think tank” dedicated to “global engagement” been doing, other than lining Biden’s pocket?
Biden is a dubiously elected, corrupt hypocrite, but a scenario in which he is removed over contrived media outrage, and legal pressure would be a Pyrrhic victory for the Right, which has little to gain from an even more powerful and entrenched deep state. A Justice Department that can remove an ineffective puppet can neutralize any resistance to bureaucratic rule, whether from Trump or whoever would fill his shoes.