Our Best Stuff on Biden’s Classified Document Scandal, George Santos, and Gas Stoves

No, really.

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President Joe Biden. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Hello and happy Saturday. There is a long-running joke—one that lives mostly on Twitter but also creeps into online commentary—about how we’re living in someone else’s scripted television show. “The writers of this season of America are really kicking up the drama,” or “Who saw that plot twist coming from the writers this season?” Readers, I regret to tell you that I have my suspicions that the writers were on something this week, and I don’t mean vacation. 

Let’s look at the stories that dominated the headlines this week: On Monday, CBS News reported that lawyers for Joe Biden had discovered classified documents in an office he kept after he was vice president. In normal times, this might not be the end of the world—others have done it, Biden’s lawyers were apparently upfront about the issue and returned the documents to the National Archives, etc.—except for the fact, of course, that former President Donald Trump took a few hundred classified docs to Mar-a-Lago when he departed the White House in 2021. Twitter is somehow still up and running despite the centrifugal forces it was subjected to as millions of users did a 180 on whatever their prior strongly held beliefs regarding the handling of classified documents had been.

But we learned that the documents had been discovered on November 2, a week before the midterms, and no one had said a peep until CBS News broke the story. Not only does that lend itself to the idea that the White House kept everything hush-hush so as not to affect the election, but it let people know that the administration had two months to prepare its response for whenever the news would inevitably break. That time was … not used wisely. Because on Wednesday we learned that Biden’s lawyers had found more classified docs, this time in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Wow, that was fast, a reasonable person might think. Right after the story broke, they did the responsible thing and went to see if there were more documents elsewhere. Nope. Those documents had been found on December 20, but for some reason, no one thought to get out in front of that when acknowledging the original story earlier in the week. 

Who would think they could try to hide all that info and not come away looking bad? Oh, I dunno. Maybe George Santos? Which brings me to another of this week’s big stories. Santos is the freshman representative from New York who lied about, well, pretty much everything en route to getting elected. There is no easy path to getting him out of office, but new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is hesitant to take the steps he could, such as denying him committee spots or censuring him. After all, McCarthy has a narrow majority and Santos supported him. Now, it’s not all bad news: As Haley reports in Uphill (🔒), New York Republicans are calling on him to resign, and Santos might have more trouble clearing up a mystery about his campaign funding than he did about questions about his background. (“I never claimed to be Jewish. … I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”) But still …

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  1. Avatar photo
    Julie from Texas

    "The thing is, these are serious stories.... But it’s hard to take these things seriously when the principal figures in them don’t." A better summary has not been stated. Thanks for staying on top of it!

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  2. Bopbob1

    Who's Nick?

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  3. Charles Stevens

    Presidents and VPs don’t do their own filing. Or set up and maintain a filing and documents management system. Their staffs do this. There is something broken with the executive branch, especially those in the White House, going back, it now appears, decades. Presidents are presented with thousands of pages of information over their tenure. That information is prepared by his executive staff and his Department Secretaries and Agency Directors staffs. A President’s executive staff researches and prepares position papers, information papers, condense information generated by outside organizations, Congress, media, other governments, etc….

    Document management is not unique to the federal government and the White House. There are well established methods and processes to track information and paper transfers across the White House staffs, the President’s inner bubble of information and decision briefings, and what is retained by the President as personal papers and what is turned over to the National Archives. The security level and degree of protection can easily be recorded and tracked, along with where each document is stored. Segregation of classified, unclassified official use information, and public released information is a straightforward process that should allow the President near instant access to information he needs to stay informed and make decisions.

    When the President (and VP) leaves office, there is a process for separating his/her personal papers, the information needed for the next President, and the information to be owned by the Archives. Trump even signed a law that strengthened those processes.

    The outgoing president/VP does not move his files from the White House and transport them to their destination. The GSA does that. And this transfer should be done in an orderly manner. Not in so much of a rush that no accountability of what is being transferred is kept. The GSA appears to place the rapid changeover from outgoing President to incoming President over the orderly transfer of office records. There is no reason the movement of the great majority of these records have to be done immediately. It will be weeks, months before the ex president or VP will have time to dig through the mountain of papers they take with them. For certain, if the White House Staffs are doing their job in at least separating classified documents from unclassified documents, there would be a more solid tracking of classified documents. If these documents are allowed to be moved with the ex president, VP, then provisions for classified storage has to be part of the transfer process.

    The fact that the the last President and a past VP had classified information that no one had any accounting of, no transfer records, no approved storage safes set up by their government staffs, points to something very broken in how the executive branch, and GSA, is organized and operates going back several, many Presidential Administrations. This will keep happening until the White House and GSA staffs responsible for Presidential Transition takes records transfers more seriously. The laws are in place, but do not appear to be enforceable. An executive order that puts the resources and accountability in place to improve presidential records management should be all that is needed. If a President or VP prevent this system from working as needed, then there are ways to alert Congress before another mess is created by yet another Administration. After all, the Staffers had no problem identifying improper phone conversations between the president and a foreign president. Certainly, they can raise the visibility of the efficacy of the the Official Records Act.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Normb1442

    It's still early days but the Biden classified document scandal seems to me to be similar to Hillary's, which is to say it's a case of sloppiness. Hillary's sloppiness has been analyzed to death and there is no evidence that there was any nefarious intent, or that Biden even knew the documents were in his possession until they were found. Trump, of course, lied about the existence of the documents, then insisted he had declassified them, so it's obvious that their presence in his possession was deliberate and that he wanted them for some reason. In either case, laws were at least flouted if not broken.

    The cases are not at all similar but as several Dispatchers have pointed out, it's sort of a distinction without a difference in political terms. What's going to happen in 2024 if we get a rerun of Biden vs. Trump (shudder) is that Biden's actions will be trumpeted on FOX and Newsmax as the equivalent of the Rosenbergs case while the MSM will pretty much ignore the story for both sides. That's because the MSM, to the extent that it is partisan, has things it can point out that a lot of the electorate thinks are worth giving Biden a second term for, whereas the Right's echo chamber has nothing similar from Trump's term in office other than a tax cut which didn't do much for any Americans who weren't already comfortable.

    Maybe you think the Infrastructure bill was a farce and the Climate bill (to call it what it is) was even worse, but both resulted or will result in things being done, some of which will help some people and harm others. That's politics biz. My point is that at least the Democrats have done SOMETHING to address the nation's problems -- for better or worse according to your political beliefs. The Republican Party, at this point, is in the position of the Los Angeles Chargers last night -- trying to run out the clock because their sponsors are on top of the world already and don't NEED any more help. If that means running and electing a President based upon culture wars that have virtually no basis in reality, hey, if we get the power, who cares how?

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  5. Brook

    Excellent report. Thanks.

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  6. Johnmarkpoling

    Gas stoves? I've visited houses where I was sure kids were going to get lung cancer or at least emphysema long before hitting puberty. What's the guvmint going to do about that?

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    1. Kgfroehle

      Taxes may solve that problem.

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    Mattjabour

    This seems like the wrong moment in time to be distracted by the gas stove thing. The document scandal could be mildly to moderately bad for Biden, and all the right wing news stations are going all Drag Queen Story Hour instead.

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    1. Avatar photo
      JohnM.

      We can focus on both, although the gas stove brouhaha seems to be on the back burner (for now).

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        J. Eric

        Nice work there. Haha

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  8. Avatar photo
    Victor Clairmont

    RACHEL!
    Why did we find another batch of top secret classified emails from Biden?!

    Why Rachel, why?!

    Does he just shove classified material into his socks and underwear?!

    Thanks for The Round Up Rachel!

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    1. Avatar photo
      Normb1442

      Sloppiness. One would have thought that after Hillary's dustup the lesson would have been learned that even innocent sloppiness can have disastrous political results even if the legal ones don't happen.

      It was said during Hillary's mess that Colin Powell did the same thing, which was true but didn't matter. Politicians got used to being sloppy with classified documents. I'm guessing some of that was because many of the documents were so innocuous that nobody knew why they'd been classified in the first place. Now that the matter has become a "gotcha" football, I expect it to happen a lot less.

      I'm holding my breath to see if McCarthy puts Santos in a position to have access to these documents. Now there's a man who's not sloppy.

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  9. Avatar photo
    JohnM.

    Thanks as always for the weekly wrap-up, Rachael. I almost always find something I missed. This week, it was Price St. Clair's piece on the Fairfax Co. school issue. However, when I clicked on that link, it took me to Friday's TMD. But I found it anyway!

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  10. Neelthakrebew

    I'll tell you one thing I don't feel any need of, and that's a flying car.

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