Perhaps It Was Inevitable

     After all, what the Left accuses the Right of doing is almost always what the Left has already done:

     Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review documents marked classified that were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News. The roughly 10 documents are from President Biden’s vice-presidential office at the center, the sources said. CBS News has learned the FBI is also involved in the U.S. attorney’s inquiry.

     The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys “were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.,” Sauber said in a statement to CBS News. The documents were contained in a folder that was in a box with other unclassified papers, the sources said. The sources revealed neither what the documents contain nor their level of classification. A source familiar with the matter told CBS News the documents did not contain nuclear secrets.

     Is anyone surprised? Is your memory of Sandy Berger that faint?

     Questions remain, of course. How sensitive were those documents? Some of them were marked Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). That’s way up there. The SCI category is for material so sensitive that its disclosure would do the U.S. serious and irreparable harm.

     How did those documents make their way to the Penn Biden Center? Was it Joe Biden himself who conveyed them there? As it happened when he was only the Vice-President, that would indicate not one but two federal crimes. The Vice-President does not have authority to access, remove, or declassify SCI material. So he should never have had access to them in the first place, much less removed them to a private facility not authorized to possess them.

     Needless to say, the tu quoque and desensitization efforts are already underway:

     CNN reporter Jamie Gangel called the story a gift to Trump. “There’s a big political side to this,” she conceded. “This is, let’s assume for the moment, that it was accidental, a mistake. This is the kind of political unforced error that I can’t believe Donald Trump hasn’t posted about yet. He will be shortly. It is the definition of a political gift to Trump and the House Republicans.”

     So the true significance isn’t the felonious handling of SCI material by an unauthorized party who later became president? It’s what Donald Trump and the GOP will do with it? Fascinating. Additionally, CBS wants you to know that it’s not all that big a deal:

     “The Penn Biden Center case has parallels to the Justice Department’s pursuit of Donald Trump’s presidential records – but the scope and scale are materially different,” according to CBS.

     Bill Clinton’s defenders got him across the finish line by chanting that “it’s just about sex.” Will the Bidenites be able to protect their puppet man in a similar fashion? We shall see.

     I once had access to classified material. The protection of that material was treated so seriously that to leave a Confidential or Secret document unmonitored for as little as ten seconds was deemed a punishable offense. To write down the combination to the lock on a classified document storage unit was even more serious. People lost their jobs over it. Some were prosecuted.

     What will be done to the dementia sufferer who whiles away his days in the Oval Office? Indictment and trial? A slap on the wrist? A stern talking-to? Even a “Joe, you should have known better?” And what about Barack Hussein Obama, who had to have known about it all?

     I know which way I’m inclined to bet.