Another bombshell drops. Aides to Mike Pence found a number of classified documents — “inadvertently boxed and transported” — at Mike Pence’s house in Indiana during a search last week. The former VPs staff found them and returned them without fuss or the need for the FBI to search the premises of a recalcitrant liar. In any other circumstances, this would be unremarkable. And worth one day’s attention at most in the media.
However, with all the brouhaha over the Trump and Biden secret document mishandling, it is a huge gift for the Democrats. They have been struggling to point out the difference between Biden’s sloppiness with classified documents and Trump’s wanton disregard of repeated legal requests to return stolen property. Now they have an escape route. All they have to do is point out the very different nature of Pence and Trump’s actions — with the obvious subtext that Biden is on the Pence end of the scale.
It also gives the Department of Justice a road out of this mess. They can treat two members of different political parties — the Democrat Biden and the Republican Pence — exactly the same. They are two men who committed misdeeds. But when they discovered they had, they immediately informed the authorities and arranged to return the documents.
In Biden’s case — as it may turn out in Pence’s case — he invited the FBI to search the premises without the DoJ having to get a search warrant after months of the miscreant stalling. We will have to see if the Democrats can play their cards correctly for once. It is not often that you get such a golden political opportunity.
For the country’s sake, they had better not fuck it up.