Democrats fear Biden controversy will be a repeat of Clinton emails

 

Democrats are increasingly concerned that the controversy surrounding classified documents found in President Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and his former office, will go a long way in his pending re-election campaign.

While Democrats say they remain confident Biden can fix the problem, they say the release of multiple packages of classified documents makes things more difficult for the president ahead of his campaign.

Privately, they wonder how difficult it would be for Biden to explain what happened, and draw comparisons to the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, in which the former secretary of state admitted to using a private email account when conducting public affairs.

It also gives Republicans a boon by making it harder for Democrats to attack former President Trump over the FBI raid of his Florida residence, where classified documents were seized in August 2022.

“It’s going to be a pretty big problem for the president,” said one Democratic strategist, who asked not to be identified to speak frankly about the problem. “Republicans have always been good at fomenting scandals, and while the situation here with Biden is completely different from the situation with Trump, they will act like it’s a big deal.”

While Democrats have privately acknowledged the problem, publicly they have gone to great lengths to prove that Trump and Biden’s situations are starkly different.

“It’s apples and oranges,” said Rodell Mollino, a seasoned Democratic strategist. At the same time, he warned that Democrats “need to carefully prepare for Republicans to turn this into the biggest scandal since Watergate.”

“This is not their silver bullet, but they will try,” he said.

This week, Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee began investigating classified documents in Biden’s possession.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) devoted much of its energy to the story in press releases and social media this week, including a video file of Biden driving his Corvette into his garage. “Here’s a snapshot of Joe Biden’s ‘locked’ GARAGE where he hid secret documents,” says one Twitter post from the NRC research account.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) jokingly linked it to Clinton’s ongoing 2016 issue on Twitter: “There’s a big story tomorrow: Hillary’s server was also in Joe’s garage.”

On Thursday and Friday, reporters insisted that administration officials could influence Biden’s decision to run for a second term.

Speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing on Friday, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the president’s senior public relations adviser, was asked if the discovery of the documents would affect his decision to run again?

“I will pass these questions on to the president,” she replied. “He can speak for himself on this.”

Asked if the release of the documents would affect Biden’s decision to run again, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates replied, “It doesn’t.”

“The president is making good on his promise to respect the independence of the Justice Department and separate it from politics,” Bates said. “You heard it from him directly, including after his agenda led to the best interim terms for a Democratic president in the 60 years he intends to run.

“With falling inflation, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, more jobs in America and lower drug prices, all in just the last week — his focus is on making even more progress for American families. We also saw the vision of the Republicans in the House of Representatives: raising taxes for the middle class to cut them for the wealthy, worsening inflation, and a national ban on abortion.”

One Biden 2020 campaign aide said if document disclosure wasn’t an issue, Republicans would have attacked the president for something else. But pursuing Biden on the issue of documents is losing for them because of Trump’s baggage on the same topic.

A former Biden campaign aide said Republicans are at a loss as to why Trump had pages after pages of documents and then resisted the FBI’s request to turn them over. The aide also said that fighting the question of who is more law-abiding is a win-win situation for Republicans, as demonstrated in the midterm elections, pointing to the FBI’s withdrawal of funding, the protection of the Jan. 6 insurgency, and the fueling of 2020 conspiracy theories.

Ultimately, the aide said, voters will be more concerned about issues such as lowering inflation.

Prior to the dispute over classified documents, Biden and his aides were receiving good news.

They had a better-than-expected midterm season that kept the Senate in Democratic hands and solidified Biden ahead of a 2024 re-election race.

Republicans appeared divided as they debated who should lead them in 2024 and whether their party should move away from Trump. Last week’s speaker’s election to the House of Representatives also highlighted divisions in the Republican Party.

Biden noted that his poll numbers rose slightly, and the economy also showed signs of improvement, including a slowdown in inflation.

Taken together, the string of good news gave Biden a head start as he prepared to announce a new run for president.

But Biden’s possession of classified documents, discovered first in his former Washington office and later in his Wilmington garage, has made Democrats nervous. The appointment of a special counsel on Thursday caused more concern.

Speaking on MSNBC on Thursday night, former Biden spokeswoman Jan Psaki expressed some concerns.

“Nobody wants a special lawyer. You don’t go through the year before you run for president and think, “I need a special advisor this year.” Nobody wants that,” Psaki said, before adding that the White House projected a sense of certainty that it was “probably sloppy work by staff during the transition” and could “end up in the long run, even with short-term pain.” in their favor.”

Former Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Committee, said Republicans may overstate the importance of document disclosure, pointing to lessons learned from the Tea Party majority that preceded former President Obama’s successful re-election in 2012. .

“President Obama was comfortably re-elected and the Democrats won eight seats in the House of Representatives,” Israel said. “I think what happened is that the majority of the Republican Party played their cards. They stirred up their base, but after a while they lost moderate voters who wanted attention and everyday problems, not daily questions.

But in private, Democrats have acknowledged that Biden did not want to enter 2023.

“Anyone can say what they want, but that weakens them, period,” said one veteran Clinton campaigner. “It’s just one of those things that will stay and won’t go away.

“It’s annoying and it’s going to continue whether they like it or not,” the former Clinton aide added. “It just creates a question. “If he’s so flippant about paperwork in the garage on his Corvette, who knows what else he’s doing?”

GOP strategist Susan Del Persio said the release of the documents was a gift to the Republicans.

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“It’s on a silver platter,” Del Persio said of the revelations. “On its own, it doesn’t matter much, but how the Republicans use it as a weapon.”

So far, she says, all the Republicans have had on Biden are disputes over taxes and business dealings around Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and issues related to the economy.

“If Biden needed a reason not to run, that’s a pretty good reason,” Del Percio said. “He won’t want to run such a campaign… if you explain, you will lose.”

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