Neil Patel: What’s Really Going On With the Phony Trump/Biden Document Scandal?

Washington standards are not able to comprehend the hypocrisy and fake posturing over the Trump/Biden classified document scandals. We are still living in the Donald Trump era by many measures. It has broken many norms. Some of it is healthy. Some of it has been healthy. Many norms will be broken by the fervor of some of the establishment and left after Trump’s election. 

It is vital to have a presidency. Respect for the office of president is important. Trump’s enemies unfairly attacked Trump, not just the presidency but also the Russian collusion story. This is what’s happening today with the classified document scandals. Trump should not have classified documents in his Florida home, but the FBI raid and the overwrought response by many commentators, including President Joe Biden was unhinged. Biden is now in a similar situation. The norms were broken, and the country, including the current President, will now live with the consequences.

First, you need to know that there are way too many classified documents. Oona Hathaway, a former Pentagon special counsel and Yale professor of law, told NPR: “There’s somewhere in the order of over 50 million documents classified every year. We don’t know the exact number because even the government can’t keep track of it all.” In a 2021 document, the government’s office for national security information said it couldn’t keep up with numbers and didn’t know how many documents were classified. 

Protecting certain national security information is vital to America’s adversaries. It is important to protect obvious data, such as high-tech weapons systems’ technical details or identities of American spies, to the fullest extent possible. Anyone who has ever been around the current system is aware of its evolution from being an important national security concern to something entirely different. There is far too much classified information. This is crucial because it runs counter to transparency, another priority of the government. The American people have the right to see how their government works. All kinds of information can be hidden by classification. This is an important issue at a time of record-breaking trust in national institutions. Transparency builds trust.

A second important point was missed in the scandal over classified documents. This is the unique role of vice president and president in our government system. The president is not a monarch. He’s not above law. However, the president and vice-president are the only elected officials in executive government. They are the only elected officials in the American system with extraordinary power. From this power flows the entire classified document regime. They are able to classify and declassify information without any interference or review from bureaucrats. They should be allowed to do this. No one in the executive branches of government is accountable directly to the American people. 

Due to the overclassification of documents, the president is drowning in classified material. Since 2004, I’ve been the person responsible for papers for the vice-president. This has allowed me to witness the volume of the issues. All of it is classified these days. It is mostly boring, and would not pose a threat to anything. Although this doesn’t relieve the president from protecting the material, an honest and fair assessment of what’s happening must consider the larger context of the office. 

Trump should not have kept classified materials in his office. However, any fair observer would know that Trump was reacting politically. Trump is a threat to the country and must be destroyed. That’s the mindset many of his biggest critics. The methods will become less important once you adopt this mindset. We don’t know what Trump actually had. Nor do we know if they were classified under the president’s authority. Unauthorized leaks by government investigators have led to some very disturbing information being made available to the public. However, if we look back at the past, these can’t be taken as factual. It’s safe to say that the FBI raid was too much. This kind of action against a former president is a serious threat to the office. Biden, who is currently the holder of this office, knew this but went along.

Biden was a part of the Trump document scandal and he got himself a political issue which no doubt helped him in the midterm elections. He is now paying the price. Biden should not have kept classified material in his garage or at the think tank. It was the worst abuse of all, as Biden waited to make the disclosure until after the midterm election and the crucial follow-up Georgia Senate elections. Biden’s actual possession is less of a national scandal than Trump’s, but it’s more of an administrative violation. Hillary Clinton’s violation involving classified materials on unclassified computers connected to the internet, was more severe than anything Trump and Biden have been charged with, and there was no criminal sanction. Biden, however, was complicit in Trump’s unfair treatment. Biden and his supporters made the Trump scandal seem more serious than it really was.

“What goes around comes around” While it will be entertaining for Biden’s adversaries, none of this is good news for America and certainly not for the office. 

Neil Patel is the co-founder of The Daily Caller. This online news site, one America’s fastest-growing, regularly reports on news and distributes it daily to over 15,000,000 monthly readers. Patel co-founded The Daily Caller News Foundation. This non-profit news organization trains journalists, conducts investigative reporting, and produces fact-checks. The Daily Caller News Foundation makes its content available to more than 300 news outlets for free, potentially reaching hundreds of million of people each month. Visit the Creators website to learn more about Neil Patel, and see features by other Creators writers or cartoonists. www.creators.com