If you’re not intently following the drip, drip, drip of the various classified documents scandals involving President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, it’s easy to lose the thread.
Suffice it to say the criticism of Biden has grown, even among Democrats. The investigation into Biden’s handling of documents, a foil for the larger investigation into Trump’s behavior, is not going away. And the emergence of the Pence issue makes this a full-on bipartisan trend of sloppiness.
I talked to Elie Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor who is out with a new book, “Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It.”
I wanted his perspective on how to view the recent developments. Our conversation, conducted by phone, is below.
Given these three revelations, it seems quite reasonable to ask, well, does every former president and vice president have classified documents? There is some responsibility on the National Archives, and potentially DOJ, to double back and make sure.
The answers that we’ve heard so far, generally speaking, from the formers is that, well, we already turned over everything. The problem, as we’re seeing, is that it turns out documents slip through the cracks and years later are found. It will be interesting to see whether and how pointed Archives or DOJ is in demanding, we need you to have lawyers go back and search through all of your archives now and reconfirm.
If that happens, it puts the formers in an interesting position. They can either say, “OK, we will do that and then risk more classified documents being found.” Or they can say, “No, we think we already did this,” which is not going to look exceptionally transparent and which is not going to play very well. They’ve got an interesting sort of dilemma coming up here.
