Rachel Maddow Ridicules MAGA Hysteria Over Biden Documents: The President Did ‘The Right Thing’
Rachel Maddow mocked conservatives hoping to concoct a bigger political outrage over the Department of Justice’s review of the classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s old office.
The MSNBC host spoke on Monday night about Biden’s attorneys discovering a small number of classified documents in the president’s former office while they were preparing to shut it down. The Obama-era classified documents were mixed with non-classified documents in the same locked closet at the Penn Biden Center. Biden’s lawyers brought the documents to the attention of the National Archives.
Maddow broke down the story, citing CBS’s reporting, but also snarked at the “brief euphoria” the news created among Biden’s critics. She (correctly) anticipated that right-wingers would use this development to create what she called a “whataboutism defense” for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents scandal.
Thus, Maddow launched into an explanation of why Trump’s handling of classified documents was far more serious by comparison, and she defended Biden for the fact that his team “did the right thing” after the documents were found.
President Trump is under federal criminal investigation for apparently, deliberately, hoarding hundreds of classified documents at had his home in Florida including refusing to hand them over after National Archives told them he had to, even after they subpoenaed him to get the documents. So there was this brief excitement on the right tonight. They thought they had a new defense, right. ‘Oh, it’s supposedly so bad what Trump did at Mar-a-Lago with all the nuclear documents and stuff. But look! Joe Biden is just as bad! Why aren’t they serving search warrants on President Biden the way they did on former President Trump?’
A brief flurry of excitement on the right about this process when the news broke about the Penn Biden Center. The reason it was only a brief flurry of excitement is because, in President Biden’s case, he and his lawyers appear to have actually done the right thing when it comes to these classified documents.
Biden’s lawyers say they discovered these documents among his presidential papers on November 2nd. The White House counsel’s office notified the National Archives that same day about what had been found. The National Archives, apparently, did not even know these documents were missing and had not been seeking their return. The Archives took custody of that material the following morning.
That appears to be it.
Maddow concluded by noting that Attorney General Merrick Garland asked John Lausch, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Chicago, to investigate how the documents wound up in Biden’s old office. She observed, however, that since the White House claims to be cooperating with the review, it “does not sound like an adversarial process” compared to the events leading up to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search.
Watch above via MSNBC.
