The impressively weak effort to ‘whatabout’ Biden’s classified documents

Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?

So it is that we enter our second (third? Who can keep track) week of apologists for former president Donald Trump seeking to equate his effort to retain documents sought by the government with a clutch of documents with classification markings found at President Biden’s home and an office he used. Despite the ongoing incomparability of the situations, the relentless, overlapping desires to curry Trump’s favor and to appeal to his loyal followers by echoing his rhetoric has generated a new series of arguments from Republicans, encapsulated over the weekend in a revealing demand.

Where, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) demanded to know, are the visitor logs from Biden’s personal residence? To which the White House responded, in short: It’s a house.

Before we adjudicate that demand — and show the failings of Comer’s efforts to defend the request — let’s take a thousand-foot look at the situation.

In November, attorneys working for Biden discovered documents with classification markings at an office at the University of Pennsylvania that Biden used after leaving the vice presidency. They were turned over to the government; it’s not clear what they contained or whether they were still classified. Further searches turned up documents at Biden’s home that were also turned over. We also don’t know much about those documents, though Biden has expressed surprise that they turned up.

By contrast, Donald Trump took dozens of boxes of material with him when he left the White House in 2021. Some of what he took was material related to his presidency that, under federal law, remain government property. So the National Archives contacted him about turning the material over. After months of back-and-forth, Trump did send a number of boxes back to Washington. In them, archivists found a mix of personal material and documents with classification markings. The National Archives alerted the Justice Department.

Federal investigators launched a probe, talking to people at Mar-a-Lago, the event space that now doubles as Trump’s home. A subpoena was issued for any documents with classification markings — regardless of classification status — and, in June 2022, an attorney for Trump attested that all material compliant with the subpoena had been turned over. But further investigation revealed that it hadn’t been. So, in August, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and found dozens more documents, including a number that had been stored in Trump’s office at the property, a place where he regularly entertained guests. The rest of the documents were kept in a storage room that was off a publicly accessible hallway.

None of this is new; none of this is complicated. If anything, the summary of Trump’s documents is overly concise relative to the summary of Biden’s because most of the intermediary steps included their own cascades of questions. (At one point, for example, the government sought surveillance footage to track who had access to the hallway near one area where documents were recovered.) At the end of the day, though, the useful comparison is less about the documents than how they were handled — though even on the question of scale and intent, Trump compares unfavorably to Biden.

After the first documents became public, the ones from the Biden think tank at Penn, there was a rush to wash away all of the questions about Trump’s actions, as though someone had dropped an Uno “reverse” card. As has so often been the case with Trump defenses, the argument shifted from “what he did was bad” — and, to be very clear, storing classified documents in an insecure way is bad regardless of who might be doing it — to “the other guys are bad too.” Or, really: “The other guys are worse.” And that’s where Comer comes in.

The oversight committee chairman sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, asking for documentation of anyone who’d visited Biden’s home. From the standpoint of trying to argue that the other guys are worse, this is a brilliant tactic: Either Biden’s team says there are no logs — which the White House says is the case given that this is his house — you get to imply nefariousness or coverup or insincerity or laxness, take your pick. And if there are logs, they would show people, like, say, Hunter Biden!!!!! visiting his father’s home. And from there, you can loop in the entire rest of the “Biden Crime Family” literary universe.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Comer made clear that contrasting Biden unfavorably with Trump was a central aim of his efforts.

“My biggest concern isn’t the classified documents, to be honest with you,” Comer said. “My concern is how there’s such a discrepancy in how former president Trump was treated by raiding Mar-a-Lago, by getting the security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor, by going through Melania’s closet, versus Joe Biden.”

The “security cameras” request, mind you, was probably aimed at least in part at ensuring that documents weren’t moved. It alone is a reminder of how the concerns and questions about the two presidents diverge. But, in an effort to go tit-for-tat with the Justice Department, and thereby to suggest equivalence, Comer demands visitor logs.

Tapper challenged Comer on this.

“Are you also asking for the visitor logs at Mar-a-Lago?” he asked. “Because the issue of whether or not sources and methods are compromised, whether or not any of these documents [have] gotten into the wrong hands, whether or not Biden or Trump allowed documents to be kept in a haphazard way, that exists, period.”

“Well,” Comer replied, “we’re doing the Biden family influence-peddling investigation.”

This is known as “begging the question.” Comer is only investigating Biden because that’s the focus of his investigation. And the purported “influence” here, it seems, is a tangential link between the Biden think tank at Penn and Chinese funding, one that, as Tapper pointed out, Penn has denied — even doing so back in 2020 when an effort to paint Biden with the same brush was attempted.

On Monday, Comer appeared on friendlier turf: Fox News’s prime time lineup. His patter was the same but the level of pushback significantly diminished.

“All we’re asking for is equal treatment here,” he insisted. “You know, why was Mar-a-Lago raided by the FBI? Why did the FBI go in and go through every room, including Barron’s room and Melania’s closet? Why did the FBI take surveillance cameras from Mar-a-Lago, but yet they haven’t set foot, to our knowledge, on the premise of either the Biden Center for Diplomacy or the Biden residence?”

The answer to those questions is consistent: Because an investigation indicated that Trump was trying to shield documents from the federal government, ones marked as classified and ones that weren’t. Again: It is not good if either Trump or Biden had classified documents in their possession; debates over the extent to which either might have unilaterally declassified them notwithstanding. But that’s not really what the Trump situation is about, which Comer certainly ought to know and certainly should convey to the public.

By suggesting that the Trump and Biden situations are the same, though, Comer and Trump’s other allies can feign equivalence and hypocrisy. And given the apparent lack of interest among Trump’s base in a more nuanced, more accurate presentation of the situation, the play works.