Republican strategist Karl Rove, also known as “Bush’s brain,” went on Fox News with his white board to show just why Donald Trump’s classified documents issue is much worse than Joe Biden’s. Rove took a break from his usual efforts to bash Democrats to actually assist Biden at a time when conservatives are rushing to draw comparisons between the classified documents found during the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort with those discovered by Biden’s lawyers at his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.
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After Rove’s Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Biden’s lawyers also found a small number of documents at his Delaware home. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to handle the Biden documents issue.
Trump, of course, wasted no time in lashing out at Rove and Biden in posts on his Truth Social platform as well as spinning new conspiracy theories. The documents date from Biden’s time as vice president. On Tuesday morning’s edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Rove was asked by co-host Dana Perino to discuss the classified documents issue.
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Here’s a transcript of Rove’s response provided by the website Mediaite.
KARL ROVE: Well, there are differences, but you can’t make this stuff up. But there are differences.
For example, how many documents in Biden’s case, there appear to be about 10. In the case of President Trump, hundreds.
How did they get there? We don’t yet know how the documents got to the Biden office connected with his activities on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania. We know that President Trump ordered the removal of the documents to Mar-a-Lago.
How responsive were they? When the Biden people found out about it, they called immediately, called the appropriate authorities and turned them over. We spent a year and a half watching the drama unfold in Mar-a-Lago, and it had to end in a police search to recover the documents.
But still, despite the differences, this is going to create lots of headaches for the Department of Justice in deciding how to handle President Trump’s issues, because now they have an issue that, in, at least in the minds of a lot of ordinary Americans, are going to be conflated as being roughly the same.
That’s why I think they did a smart thing in turning this over to the U.S. attorney in Chicago to look at initially that because that’s the, one of the two remaining Trump U.S., Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys left in the Justice Department. That and the Delaware, who, the Delaware U.S. attorney who’s looking into Hunter Biden. But this strikes me as being very problematic for the for the Biden Justice Department.
Salon reported that in his Truth Social post, Trump claimed that Biden keeping classified documents is worse because the documents date back to when Biden was only vice president and he had no power to declassify them. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he secretly declassified the documents found in the search of Mar-a-Lago, although the claim has been refuted by former senior administration officials. Trump wrote:
"Karl Rove was, as usual, wrong when he stated that then V.P. Biden's HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL papers, which were in his office for many years, were in any way similar to the Secret Service guarded, & otherwise very secure, Mar-a-Lago papers, Biden was not then President, had no power to declassify, & came under the very tough Federal Records Act. I come under the much more generous Presidential Records Act, was having productive discussions with Radical Left NARA, & did everything right. A giant Scam."
(NARA is the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency responsible for handling presidential records.)
In another post, Trump put forth wild conspiracy theories about what the Biden documents might contain. He brought up Hunter Biden and Ukraine, and repeated an ethnic slur about Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has become a target of Trump’s wrath. Trump wrote:
"Biden's documents are HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, many pertain to UKRAINE, where Hunter was 'raking in the dough,' and FUNDED BY CHINA, which gave $55 Million to Biden, through Penn, and probably had easy access. Was the Old Crow's boss, China loving Coco Chow, involved? Just asking?"
So now we have Bush’s Brain vs. the Orange Stain! Pass the popcorn.