Hypocrisy and distortion in Republicans’ attempts to find critical differences between the two classified documents cases
One of the Republican claims about Pence holds up. His aides and lawyers told various stories about where the documents came from. He stored the documents in at least two unsecured locations. The boxes were taped, but as conservatives are happy to point out in Biden’s case, tape is easily removed. Pence’s lawyers took longer to inform the government than Biden’s lawyers did. They didn’t tell Congress or the public for eight days—longer than the six days Republicans say was inexcusable in Biden’s case. The government allowed Pence’s team, like Biden’s, to manage custody of documents that need to be inspected. And DOJ kept its mouth shut about Pence’s documents, as it had about Biden’s.
That doesn’t make Pence a liar or spy. He’s just a fallible politician who lost track of documents in what seems to be a poorly managed system for monitoring the flow of classified material. Like Biden, Pence cooperated with the government, and the government, in turn, cooperated with him. Nobody had to issue a subpoena or get a court order to recover his documents.
Only one guy, Trump, required that kind of escalation. And it isn’t because he was a Republican. He could have cooperated like Pence and Biden. He didn’t.