Biden’s Supposedly ‘Secure’ Garage Is Irrelevant to the Case

Thus far, President Biden’s two responses to the discovery that he had been keeping Obama-era classified documents at his personal residence have been:

1. I didn’t know I had them until December 20, 2022, and I still don’t know what’s in them.
2. Don’t worry, because the documents were safely stored in my “locked garage.”

But both of these cannot be true — at least not deliberately so. If Biden didn’t know he had classified documents in his garage, he cannot have knowingly secured them. Which means that, if his garage was, indeed, locked, it was locked for other reasons, and thus that the classified documents that it contained were secured by dumb luck. As a matter of happenstance, it’s a good thing that the documents weren’t, say, kept on the roof. But Biden does not get any credit for that being true, and it doesn’t in any way mitigate his recklessness. We do not as a matter of habit keep classified documents in garages that are attached to people’s homes. In no other circumstance would that be our operating procedure, and in no universe would the federal government say, “Oh, you have them, but they’re in a locked garage? That’s fine then.” As for “locked”? Hardly. There are videos online showing Biden’s garage door being left open, and we know that people other than Biden — including his son, Hunter, the textbook definition of a security risk — had access to the house. It’s bad.

How bad? Well, there’s the rub. As the Editors point out over on the home page:

Government officials, even if they have not been handling classified intelligence for nearly half a century as Biden has, are well aware of the rules for reviewing, retaining, and safekeeping classified information, which are constantly drilled into them.

Their agreement to abide by those standards is the principal condition for obtaining privileged access to it. This is why officials may be found guilty if they have been grossly negligent in handling the documents, a standard that includes handling classified intelligence so cavalierly it is lost track of or is retained in an unauthorized location.

Was Biden “grossly negligent”? Maybe. Certainly, he was cavalier. Certainly, he lost track of the documents. Certainly, they were retained in an unauthorized location. Nevertheless, under the standard the government adopted for Hillary Clinton — which was that Clinton was “extremely careless,” not “grossly negligent,” and could therefore not be prosecuted — it would be impossible to justify taking action against Biden.

Last year, I responded to the news that Donald Trump had kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago by proposing that

if Trump did this, he should absolutely be . . . well, what should he be? Certainly, he should be termed a grotesque hypocrite for arguing that Hillary should be “locked up” for a crime he committed himself. But, beyond that? Hillary was not, in fact, “locked up.” She wasn’t even prosecuted. I thought she probably should have been prosecuted, just as I think that, if there’s evidence that Trump did this, it would be reasonable to prosecute him, too. But that isn’t what has happened in this area when the person of interest is extremely powerful. So what next? Goose, meet gander.

I think the same thing in relation to Joe Biden, whose infractions seem to me to be by far the least egregious of the three. If, as a matter of habit, we prosecuted high-level officials for this sort of behavior, I could see a case for prosecuting Biden, too — albeit only after Clinton and Trump had been dealt with. But we don’t do that. And, because we don’t do that, it would be unjust to make an exception here.