Last September, when 60 Minutes asked Joe Biden what he thought of the August raid at Mar-a-Lago where the FBI found folders of classified documents mixed in with Donald Trump’s personal effects and papers, the president said he was shocked. Biden wanted to know how “anyone could be that irresponsible.” He worried about what sources and methods might have been compromised by his predecessor’s carelessness. Were there agent lists among those purloined records?
That bit of political point-scoring has become a petard with which the president has hoist himself. Two months later, Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his Wilmington home and garage and in his personal office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. Confronted in January about his own carelessness, Biden shrugged it off. The garage which houses his vintage Corvette Stingray, he assured reporters, was locked. “So it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street.”
As if that turnabout weren’t enough, enter Mike Pence. When he was asked in January about Biden’s mishandling of documents, Trump’s vice president said it was a “serious matter.” Wait a couple of weeks, and what do you know? Pence’s lawyers too found classified material in his Indiana home.