Dum-Da-Dum-Dum

Cue the Dragnet theme:

I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate, start to finish. I was young enough at the time to have supported McGovern in 1972, and I thirstily drank up every detail of Nixon's subsequent downfall. The appointment of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the matter in May, 1973 was a big event, since it was forced on the Nixon administration as a condition of Eliot Richardson's Senate confirmation as attorney general. In fact, for those of us who followed the story closely, this was the key sign that Nixon was on his way out.

The odd thing is that Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Trump just this past November. It's hard to avoid thinking this was a deeply unserious act intended to drive a stake through the potential for a 2024 Trump run, while Trump steadily fades as a prospect even without it. Garland's problem now, though, with the opposing party in control of the House, is that he's much more in Eliot Richardson's position, with the appointment of another special prosectuor forced on him to appoint an investigator to undermine his own administration.

A problem that won't go away is that lawyers appear to have been involved in the discovery of classified documents at Biden home and office locations from the start. According to NPR,

President Biden's lawyer have [sic] found additional classified documents at his Wilmington, Del., residence, according to his counsel Richard Sauber, who said "all but one" of the new documents were found in storage in Biden's garage, and one document was in stored materials in "an adjacent room."

Richard Sauber turns up on a web search as of last May 22:

The White House has hired Richard Sauber to assist in the Biden administration’s response to potential future investigations should Republicans win back majorities in Congress in the midterm elections, officials confirm to CNN.

Sauber, currently the top lawyer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and [sic]is expected to begin at the White House in the next few weeks with the title “special counsel to the president.”

He was previously a partner at Washington law firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP. The NPR story continues,

"Following the discovery of government documents at the Penn Biden Center in November 2022, and coordinating closely with the Department of Justice, the President's lawyers have searched the President's Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, residences — the other locations where files from his Vice-Presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition. The lawyers completed that review last night," Sauber's statement said.

A complication in the timeline is that Biden, while he is thought to have had an office at the Penn Biden center following its opening in 2018, was involved in setting an operation up there even before he left the vice presidency in January 2017.

On April 25, 2016, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Craig Gering emailed Hunter with "confidential notes from our meeting," in which Gering listed apparent plans that were discussed for the vice president upon leaving office.

One of those plans included "wealth creation," with no further explanation, and another included an apparent reference to the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., with a possible job opportunity for Hunter.

"The Biden Institute of Foreign Relations at the University of Pennsylvania," Gering's email read. "Focus on foreign policy. In addition to the institute at U of Penn, the school has an existing office in DC that will be expanded to house a DC office for VP Biden (and Mike, Hunter and Steve?). Operates like The Clinton Global Initiative without the money raise."

Hunter then confirmed Gering's notes but emphasized that they needed to be "very confidential" because they were not set in stone.

It appears that what became the Penn Biden Center was a shadow Biden administration while Biden himself was temporarily out of office:

At least 10 senior Biden administration officials were hired to their current or former positions after stints at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the president's think tank where a trove of classified documents was recently found.

The Washington, D.C.-based Penn Biden Center — a foreign policy think tank President Biden opened in 2018 — previously employed current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Blinken and Richetti both served as managing directors while Kahl was a strategic consultant at the center.

At minimum, it looks like the Biden administration was resigned to the likelihood that Republicans would return to some type of congressional control in November 2022, which in fact they narrowly did. Based on that expectation, the White Houae hired Richard Sauber to scrub the Biden Center records (coincidentally, sauber in German means "clean"). Mr Sauber has presumably been working on this since last spring, but by November, he was in a position where he was forced to disclose the classified records. Further searches turned up more documents at Biden's residences. (I imagine that Mr Sauber found these papers well before they were officially reported, and it wouldn't surprise me if more revelations are to come.)

It seems to me that there are differences between Trump's documents at Mar-a-Lago and Biden's at the Biden Center. In Trump's case, these apparently were random paper detritus scooped up from the White House residence at the last minute, boxed willy-nilly by domestic staff, and shipped directly to storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago; Trump was unaware of their specific contents and presumably hadn't looked at any of them. In Biden's case, it appears that they had somehow left government locations, possibly in the vice presidential residence or elsewhere, been shipped to another intermediate location where Biden was aware of them, and then identified as such and shipped again from that location, his Wilmington home or elsewhere, to his offices at the Penn Biden Center, where they were in active use without any declassification, as part of a "wealth creation" exercise involving Hunter. Biden has far less of a defense that it was inadvertent, and beyond that, as only the former vice president at the time, he never had Trump's declassification authority.

At least, that's one way to see it. Speculation is that maybe this is an effort by Democrat insiders to derail a Biden run in 2024. But no Democrat wants the sort of scandal this could well become, especially if Hunter is involved. I doubt if we've seen anything like the full story up to now.