Rachel Maddow explains why Biden categorised paperwork are a dud

Rachel Maddow contrasted how Trump each handled the news of classified documents in their offices to show why the Biden story is nothing.

Video by Maddow:

Maddo says:

As I said, there was a brief flurry on the right about this process tonight when the news broke about the Penn Biden Center. It was only a brief flurry because in President Biden’s case, he and his attorneys appear to have actually done the right thing when it comes to these classified documents. Biden’s attorneys say they discovered those documents among his vice presidential papers on Nov. 2. The White House Office notified the National Archives of the finds that same day. The National Archives apparently did not even know that these documents were missing and had not sought their return.

The archives took custody of this material the next morning. That seems to be it. Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked one of the last remaining Trump-appointed US attorneys to review the discovery of these documents at the Penn Biden Center, but it doesn’t sound like an adversarial process at all. The White House says it is cooperating fully with the national archives and the Justice Department on the review.

Again, this was not, as in Trump’s case, the desperate search of the archives for the return of the material that Trump called off, and Trump denied those requests and ultimately called off the subpoena to return those documents.

These appear to be documents accidentally kept at the Penn Biden Center and discovered by Biden’s attorneys. They notified the White House, which immediately notified the National Archives that these documents were in the wrong place. The archive moved to retrieve them immediately. That seems to be the sum of those, as far as we know.

Get more stories like these delivered to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter:

The current President followed the law. The ex-president chose to break the law. That is the difference between the character of the two men. That’s one of the reasons Joe Biden is currently President and Donald Trump isn’t.

For a brief moment, Republicans thought they had their Biden scandal, but their hopes crumbled to dust when Biden’s behavior demonstrated why Trump should be impeached.

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House press pool and congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a bachelor’s degree in political science. His thesis focused on public policy with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and professional memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association