Quote (IceMage @ 17 Jan 2023 03:22)
It's a concept called "consciousness of guilt". If one person immediately gives back classified documents, and the other person refuses to give them back while lying about giving them back, it's a clear distinction.
Immediately?! Biden sat on these documents for 6 years. And we know for a fact that it cannot be a case of "took some work back home while he was still the VP and then forgot about it" - Biden's Penn Center office didn't exist until 2018 while he left the White House in Jan 2017. Hence, the documents which were found in the Penn Center must have been moved at some point, either by Biden or his staffers. That was the last moment in the timeline when the consciousness of guilt defense would have been feasible.
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What Biden did was potentially criminal.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but possession of classified material without authorization/clearance is always a crime, not just "potentially".
It's funny that you're making this point by the way. A few months ago, in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago raid, Trump's detractors were constantly emphasizing that the sheer possession of these documents already violates the law; and that he would, legally-speaking, be on the hook for not just obstruction but also possession if the DoJ wanted to pursue that. I definitely remember several people stressing this point even in the corresponding thread here on PaRD.
Quote (Slipry @ 17 Jan 2023 09:58)
Dems clearly decided to cut Biden loose, guess they realized they can't prop him up (literally) for another four years.
I don't think so. Biden just led them to a much-better-than-expected midterm performance and they still lack a clear alternative, now that Harris has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she doesn't have it.
Imho, Democratic strategists are deliberately letting this scandal play out now, so that it will have run its course and been forgotten by the time the 2024 campaign gets going. It's not a huge scandal and most voters won't really care about the actual crime, just the hypocrisy. They're strategically sacrificing the endgame of the investigation into Trump for his documents (which would presumably not have amounted to much anyway) so that they can take one potential Biden scandal off the table, and they're doing so at a time which minimizes the long-term damage to Biden.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 17 2023 03:34am