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Biden is trapped in uncertain territory
That Biden is now also facing an investigation by a special counsel over alleged mishandling of classified materials, just like his erstwhile and potential rival Trump, spells an uncertain patch in his political trajectory ahead of the upcoming election year.
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n a matter of days, things have suddenly taken a very ugly turn for United States President Joe Biden. It appears his political career has plunged into an uncertain patch.
This year started on a rather positive note for President Biden: economic indicators were moving upward, inflation was slowing down, his approval rating was showing improvement and the Democrats were united behind him for his 2024 reelection campaign while the Republicans were busy in settling their internal feuds.
All was set for a good start to 2023 for Biden, but the case surrounding his handling of classified materials has suddenly changed the whole complexion.
On Nov. 2, 2022 Biden’s personal attorneys first found a set of classified documents in a locked closet while moving boxes out of the Penn Biden Center, a Washington-based think tank where he had worked after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until he launched his presidential campaign in 2019. The attorneys notified the National Archives, which retrieved the documents the next day and referred the matter to the Justice Department.
On Dec. 20, 2022 the Justice Department was informed that another set of classified documents had been discovered in the garage at Biden’s Wilmington home, near his Corvette, and the cache was immediately handed over to agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland then revealed that another search was conducted on Jan. 11 at the President’s private home, and a few more official records were recovered from the library. Subsequent to this, Garland appointed Robert Hur, a onetime US attorney appointed by former president Donald Trump, as a special counsel to lead the investigation into this very sensitive case.
Interestingly, two months ago, Garland had also appointed a special counsel to investigate a similar case involving Trump. This shows that the Justice Department is working independently on the high-profile cases of two presidents in an inordinately heated political environment.
Not surprisingly, immediate comparisons were drawn between the two cases.
Biden’s supporters, in particular, are trying to defend his case as the “milder one” based on two major premises. One is that the volume of classified documents in Biden’s case is small compared with the hundreds of papers recovered from Trump’s Florida residence. And two, unlike Trump’s uncooperative behavior, Biden is fully cooperating with the investigation teams and there is no evidence that he had purposely tried to cause any hindrance to the search operations.
Indubitably, there is a marked difference in Trump and Biden’s approaches in their respective cases. Trump was very reactive when his Mar-a-Lago private residence was raided by federal agents. He bluntly accused the FBI and the Justice Department of conducting a politically motivated investigation in a direct attempt to discourage him from running for the White House again, which he subsequently announced in November last year.
In contrast, President Biden has been showing complete cooperation with the investigators.
“People know I take classified documents and classified material seriously. We’re cooperating fully [and] completely with the Justice Department’s review,” he responded to questions from the media about his case.
It is true that Biden’s case involves a very insignificant quantity of documents and he is exhibiting very cooperative behavior toward the probe, but these do not lessen the degree of his alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act, which decrees that such records should be stored securely and transferred to the National Archives once an administration ends.
Another question Biden has to answer is why it took so long for him to tell the public what had happened.
As expected, Trump has seized this opportunity to hit back very hard and try to mitigate the intensity of his case. He roared during a talk radio interview, “It’s over. […] It really changed the complexion and the intensity that they were showing to me because, you know, what they did is, I don’t say far worse, I did nothing wrong, what they did is not good. What they did is bad.”
Similarly, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, is also demanding Congress and intelligence agencies to conduct a deep investigation into the Biden case.
From Biden’s perspective, the appointment of a special counsel is a nasty distraction at a very inopportune time that also has the potential to muddy the case against Trump.
It is certainly a very tricky situation, both politically and ethically, for a President who has always touted his high ethical standards with pride. So, here begins a messy election season in which the incumbent and a former US president are both facing investigations by special counsels as they pull up their socks for a potential rematch in 2024.
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The writer is a Karachi-based freelance columnist on international relations.
