President Biden said last Thursday that he has “no regrets” about his response to the discovery of mishandled classified information. “There’s no ‘there’ there,” he said. The next day, FBI agents searched his private home in Wilmington, Del., for 13 hours and retrieved six additional items, dating to his time in the Senate and as vice president. This was at least the fifth tranche of classified material discovered since November in unsecured places that have ranged from the Delaware garage where the president parks his Corvette to the Washington think tank where he kept an office during his interregnum between the Obama administration and his own.
So, Mr. Biden should be feeling at least some regret. At a minimum, he and those around him were sloppy with the handling and storage of sensitive materials, and set a poor example for civil servants entrusted with clearances. His team could have been clearer much earlier about how much of that material had been found. His defensiveness has chipped away at the credibility of his claim that “people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously.”
Though comparisons are inevitable, there are significant differences between what is known about Mr. Biden’s actions in this situation and what he called his predecessor Donald Trump’s “totally irresponsible” behavior with regard to keeping top-secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The current president deserves credit for cooperating with the Justice Department inquiry and giving the FBI free rein to search his home. Mr. Trump vigorously fought federal efforts to retrieve documents that didn’t belong to him. In another contrast with the former president, Mr. Biden is showing respect for the independence of the department that reports to him.
But there is also much we still don’t know in Mr. Biden’s case, including the specific nature of the documents and whether anyone else accessed them. Was the president merely careless or could the disclosure of what was in his possession plausibly jeopardize national security? So far, there is no evidence of intentional wrongdoing.
Skip to end of carousel
End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
1/5
This Editorial Board expressed dismay about the degree to which Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information factored into the 2016 election. More recently, we’ve questioned whether the appointment of a special counsel was warranted in the Biden case, even for the sake of consistency with the Trump one. We’ve highlighted the long-standing need to repair the antiquated and overwhelmed classification system.
But none of that lets Mr. Biden off the hook. It is important that authority figures try to follow the rules and own up to their mistakes when they make them. Justice Department guidelines mean that no sitting president will be indicted. But maximum allowable transparency is vital. Mr. Biden needs to ditch the defensiveness. Acknowledging that he has grounds for regret would be a good start.