Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Frumple]

What I don't get about this documents thing.
With Trump, documents were found after he was no longer president. So yeah, obviously he had no business posessing those.

But Biden is still president. Isn't he in his full right to take his work home?

I mean, with Trump, the documents were outright stolen, intentionally, the man stonewalled and lied repeatedly when caught on it, and has continued to this date to be fight over the issue. Some of it might have even been okay to keep, or at least keep copies of, if he had gone through the proper procedures and cooperated with the national archive folks, but, y'know, he didn't.

Biden's stuff is to all appearances things that were lost in the back of a filing cabinet or somethin', mostly during the period shortly after his son had fucking died, and he and his staff has been cooperating fully with the relevant organizations from the moment someone noticed the stuff was there.

The documents shouldn't have been where they are -- not because they were moved there inappropriately, but because they weren't returned when they should have been, which again, is wildly different from the documents having been outright fucking stolen -- but there's not even a little bit of similarity between the two situations beyond "classified documents were in a place they shouldn't have been".

[Dostoevsky]

In this case I didn't, which was wrong of me, as I assumed that this was worse than it was (assuming it is non-binding and if it can't be used to defend from suits) from the information I did read. What a fool I was to not read the bill before becoming incensed.

Eh, don't be too hard on yourself here.

Here's the text, by the by. Joint Resolution, "expressing support," and classic non-binding language. You are correct that some parties historically do try to use things like this in lawsuits, though to do so successfully typically requires plenty of other evidence in addition to just a resolution expressing support for something. (Well, that's the federal perspective - I don't know WY administrative law.) And that assumes it actually passes, which this one hasn't (yet; as short as WY's session is it's still relatively early).

The documents shouldn't have been where they are -- not because they were moved there inappropriately, but because they weren't returned when they should have been, which again, is wildly different from the documents having been outright fucking stolen -- but there's not even a little bit of similarity between the two situations beyond "classified documents were in a place they shouldn't have been".

As one of my law professors would half-jokingly drone in class, "The law, is the law, is the law." The context matters quite a bit in the narrative, yes, but given the amount and variety of anger at the round of this with Trump and the Biden team's prior language on this, "optically" (that beloved word of the beltway) this is a problem. There are mitigating factors, but he (or his team) seems to have broken a law that he was just crowing about a political opponent breaking.

[nenjin]

It's the difference between being a day late to pay a speeding ticket, and changing your identity to avoid one. Both technically a violation of the law? Yeah. One is an honest mistake, the second is clearly flouting the law.

You could make the argument that Biden should face some sort of punishment in an effort to bridge the continental divide that is American politics these days. I generally support the idea that the law is the law is the law, and I don't have a ton of love for Biden.

But I think it's reverse whataboutism to even start putting them on equal footing. Just in terms of the amount of tax payer dollars that had to go into retrieving the documents from Trump, versus Biden.

[Dostoevsky]

I personally agree it's not equal footing between them, but I also think Biden's in a situation worse than 'day late to pay a speeding ticket'. I also think (without proof, admittedly) that the average joe & jane hear "classified documents" and think 007 instead of state department staff gossip and will consider this pretty bad form.

[Frumple]

I personally agree it's not equal footing between them, but I also think Biden's in a situation worse than 'day late to pay a speeding ticket'.

I mean, I'unno? Some/most of it's apparently stuff the archives didn't even notice was missing, and stayed that way for the better part of a decade. I can guarantee you that if I were seven years late to pay a speeding ticket, someone would notice :V

[lemon10]

I personally agree it's not equal footing between them, but I also think Biden's in a situation worse than 'day late to pay a speeding ticket'.

Making sure that the documents are in the right place isn't really the president's responsibility, its the responsibility of his staff; not just in practice but also legally.

I also think (without proof, admittedly) that the average joe & jane hear "classified documents" and think 007 instead of state department staff gossip and will consider this pretty bad form.

I agree with this to some extent. I think many people in America believe that Biden and Trump are just as bad and that [insert normal thing that Biden/Hillary/Obama did] was just as bad as [very obviously illegal thing that Trump did.
They are of course objectively wrong.
---
An organization accidently leaving classified documents somewhere is a failure of the normal system of goverment, but comparing it to someone intentionally stealing boxes of documents (as Fox and co have been doing) is intentionally disingenuous and like many of their arguments intentional bad faith debating.

Its like comparing someone that accidently hit someone with their golf cart with someone that intentionally ran over dozens of people with theirs.
They aren't even the same type of crime!

[Dostoevsky]

Making sure that the documents are in the right place isn't really the president's responsibility, its the responsibility of his staff; not just in practice but also legally.

I honestly don't know the ins and outs of the law in question, though I'd expect there to be at least some level of 'buck stops here', if not in the statute then in the public perception.

I agree with this to some extent. I think many people in America believe that Biden and Trump are just as bad and that [insert normal thing that Biden/Hillary/Obama did] was just as bad as [very obviously illegal thing that Trump did.
They are of course objectively wrong.

That's the thing, whether or not they're right isn't necessarily the most important question. It's about their perceptions, and the degree to which those perceptions change their own behaviors (e.g. their voting behaviors). People believe in wrong things a heck of a lot of the time, and as we've seen simply telling people they're wrong / what is right is not often a compelling argument.

And heck, sometimes the wrong people end up being more right than one might think. Don't think I'd say that's the case here, but it happens.

[Folly]

I mean, with Trump, the documents were outright stolen, intentionally, the man stonewalled and lied repeatedly when caught on it, and has continued to this date to be fight over the issue.

Trump lies habitually.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Trump had absolutely no knowledge of the classified documents until the government started demanding that he return them. Then, because Trump is incapable of admitting that he's not in complete control of everything at all times, he made up the story that he took the documents deliberately, it was his right to do so, and he was under no obligation to give them back.

imo, taking the documents was not so bad or unusual; it seems that over-classification makes it pretty much impossible for any politician in Washington to to go a single day without moving some classified documents around.
Where things went wrong was Trump's refusal to return the documents, or even bother to secure them properly after it was explained to him that they contained highly sensitive information. That mishandling of the situation is pretty much the polar opposite of how Biden handled his classified documents.

[anewaname]

...
Perhaps it would be actually useful to have Biden fall on his sword. If a sitting President can be seen to be unable to go against relatively trivial document handling indiscretions, then it wipes out his predecessor's claims that having been President means that he can agregiously flout the rules
...

Yes, the National Archive people might have started an audit of Biden (and others) specifically so they could show they are not politically targeting Trump. If anything, Trump empowered them within the government for the time being.

[Lord Shonus]

imo, taking the documents was not so bad or unusual; it seems that over-classification makes it pretty much impossible for any politician in Washington to to go a single day without moving some classified documents around.
Where things went wrong was Trump's refusal to return the documents, or even bother to secure them properly after it was explained to him that they contained highly sensitive information. That mishandling of the situation is pretty much the polar opposite of how Biden handled his classified documents.

We know some of the documents in question (for Trump) are not overclassified. One of the big delays in processing the case was finding somebody with enough security clearance to even look at the things, because they're burn-before-reading levels of classified.

It is possible I misread what you're saying here.

[hector13]

imo, taking the documents was not so bad or unusual; it seems that over-classification makes it pretty much impossible for any politician in Washington to to go a single day without moving some classified documents around.
Where things went wrong was Trump's refusal to return the documents, or even bother to secure them properly after it was explained to him that they contained highly sensitive information. That mishandling of the situation is pretty much the polar opposite of how Biden handled his classified documents.

burn-before-reading levels of classified.

There’s a joke in there somewhere.

[Random_Dragon]

The other thing absent here that makes the whataboutism pointless is that, unlike with Trump, there's no reason to suspect those documents were getting sold off to countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia. Which is important given that would be espionage if not genuine treason, the sort of thing that has net people the death penalty in the past.

Of course, it won't stop Trump's base from crying for the death penalty for their political opponents regardless, because they're still a bunch of wannabe fascists, but still. :v

[Dostoevsky]

The other thing absent here that makes the whataboutism pointless is that, unlike with Trump, there's no reason to suspect those documents were getting sold off to countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia.

Not that I believe this happened myself, but I'm 100% positive there are people (not just Trumpists) who believe Hunter Biden would be into that.

[Frumple]

There's people that would believe hunter would do literally anything at this point. It's pretty irrelevant considering he doesn't and didn't have the documents in question.

[Thorfinn]

There is also that, while Biden is President (in ways the other bloke is not), these ...or at least some of them..? date to his time as VP. Which may have given him the rights to possess them at the time, at least part way up to the similar point of "not even should be left on the desk of the Oval Office, without a suitable guard" level, but would not necessarily cover his subsequent time out of Office (and the documents having been taken out of the 'Whitehouse office').

Sort of. In March of 2003, Bush amended someone else's executive order and expanded the power to declassify to the VP. You know damn well Liz Cheney knew that, or that her pappy mentioned something to her to make sure she didn't go there. (See for example https://sgp.fas.org/bush/eoamend.html, search for "Vice".) Obama, Trump and now Biden have just never changed it.

So despite there being no one who thought letting VP Biden declassify documents was a good idea, he has legal basis for having done so. To the extent an EO can authorize that, of course.