What's more important in the docs investigations? Politics or the law?
...several of the weekend news appearances by legislators have strained mightly to turn the Biden documents story into a major scandal on par with Trump's open criminality.
So far we've seen voluntary and immediate cooperation from the Biden legal team in informing the responsible authorities practically hours after discovery of potentially sensitive materials in President's storage.
However, the main complaint from reporters, and even some Democratic legislators this morning, is that the press wasn't clued in right away, and that the chambers of government where this issue is being treated like a new box of pastries in the congressional cloakroom wasn't given the heads up to begin immediately wringing their hands and whinging along with the press about the optics they are primed to warp and distort in focus with their own opportunistic political views.
What they're grabbing at in the Biden box, though, isn't the jelly-filled goo and the sugar-dusted dessert that Trump served up with his reflexive prevarications and instinctive obstruction of authority. It's a model of cooperation that used to be the norm, the dedicated adherence to rules and law which serve to keep our fragile democracy together at the seams where it threatens to rip apart.
here's the WaPo account:
In mid-November, in a communication that has not previously been reported, a senior official in the Justice Department’s national security division wrote a letter to Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal attorney, asking for his cooperation with the department’s inquiry. The Justice official asked specifically that Biden’s legal team secure the materials from the Penn Biden Center and refrain from further reviewing them or other relevant documents that might be stored at different locations, according to the letter, the contents of which were shared with The Post.
The Justice official also requested that Bauer give the Justice Department formal consent to review the Penn Biden materials, and that he provide a list of other locations where relevant materials might be stored as the department weighted the proper protocols for future document searches.
That letter, with its implication that the Justice Department would take the lead in the inquiry, paved the way for the Biden team’s approach: They adopted a strategy of caution and deference, making only limited moves in coordination with federal investigators to determine the number of documents involved, their significance and how they were mishandled...
After the Biden White House alerted the National Archives, it did make initial moves to learn how the classified documents had reached the Penn Biden Center and possibly elsewhere, according to two people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. But by Nov. 10, ... the Justice Department informed Biden’s lawyers it was launching its own inquiry and within weeks would be sitting down with Biden aides for interviews, according to two people familiar with the process.
At that point, Biden’s attorneys stopped seeking information from his staffers, seeking to avoid any impression they were tampering with witnesses, the people said. Instead, they switched abruptly into a highly cautious mode, deferring almost completely to the federal investigators.
Legislators and others will need to decide what they believe is more consequential. Adherence to the law, or spending their time trying to make sure they don't provoke another self-serving round of Chuck Todd's questions and concerns.
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