(Dobbs) Do Weeks Get Any Worse for the President?

The answer is, they probably will.

Joe Biden is having a bad week. A very very very bad week.

Not as bad as the week of our messy withdrawal in 2021 from Afghanistan. That had to be Biden’s worst. That week, thirteen American servicemen died. Those are a president’s most mournful moments. What’s more, Biden’s political popularity never fully recovered.

But this week could rank as second worst for the president, with a different death keeping him up at night: the conceivable death of his chance for a second term.

Today one could hear faint sounds of that death knell when Attorney General Merrick Garland did what he had to do, and what he should do, appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the classified— and according to some reports, “top-secret”— files that turned up first at Joe Biden’s think tank, then at his own home. How could the AG do otherwise, given that a different special prosecutor is investigating the symmetrical sins of Donald J. Trump?

It is a problem of Biden’s own making, not just his careless storage of classified documents that date back to his days as Vice President, but his damning denunciation of Trump for doing the very same thing, asking on CBS’s “60 Minutes” back in September how “anyone could be that irresponsible.” 

From what we know so far, the details are as different as dawn from dusk. When Biden’s own lawyers found these sensitive documents while going through his papers at the think tank, they immediately notified and had them delivered to the presidential records division of the National Archives, which didn’t even know they were missing. Then when they found more in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home, they told the Department of Justice. That’s all in stark contrast to the case of Trump. The National Archives had to go after him. He and his lawyers resisted, obfuscated, and flat-out lied about what the ex-president had recklessly stowed all over Mar-a-Lago (and in a separate storage unit in West Palm Beach), leading to the possibility of federal charges of obstruction of justice.

But that doesn’t change the fact that whether he even knew he had classified papers among his personal possessions or not, Joe Biden now comes across as a hypocrite. And when a reporter asked him about the wisdom of storing them in his garage “next to his Corvette,” Biden didn’t help himself by insouciantly shooting back, “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, okay? So, it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.”

At the very worst, it’s about irresponsible behavior on the president’s part, even if all these documents were merely “inadvertently misplaced” as a White House counsel said today (an argument far harder to make in the case of Donald Trump). But even at the very best, it’s about optics. Bad ones. Optics that allowed Ohio’s incendiary Jim Jordan, the new chairman of the newly-formed Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, to tell Fox News, “The double standard is obvious.”

It pains me to say it but he’s right. And the Republicans will use this to say, where there’s smoke there’s fire. Of course the smoke around Donald Trump is thick enough to choke on. In comparison, Biden’s looks like a thin haze.

ABC’s host Jimmy Kimmel got it right last night when he joked, “Any time documents are mishandled, top-secret documents, it needs to be taken seriously. That’s something Republicans and Democrats believe, although Republicans have only believed it since Monday.”

But that’s what we’re stuck with. Jordan’s “weaponization” subcommittee, and inevitably others in a House now run by the Republicans, will use this scandal with Biden’s documents to regurgitate the hypocrisy and reinforce their claim that the Democrats weaponized the federal government to act against them, including the infamous raid for Trump’s documents at Mar-a-Lago. Furthermore, in an unsettling sign that Jordan’s subcommittee may give a pass to the perpetrators of the January 6th insurrection— not just the mob that stormed the Capitol but the mob of politicians who enabled them— it includes “ongoing criminal investigations” in its portfolio of targets.

It’s a very very very bad week for Joe Biden.

The week before was bad enough. The new Congress was sworn in with a Republican majority in the House and its radical members— which these days means just about all of them— swore to go after everything with Biden’s name on it, beginning with his son Hunter’s profitable dealings with foreign companies back when his father was vice president. The president’s detractors say that it reeks of conflicts of interest— which it might— and although they haven’t produced the evidence, they say that when Hunter profited, Joe did too. That’s why the new chair of the House Oversight Committee, Kentucky’s James Comer, told a news conference that the pursuit of Hunter Biden is only a stepping stone to something bigger: “This is an investigation of Joe Biden.” Comer’s colleagues already are talking about “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

That is in tandem with a threat to put Biden in the hot seat if the worst of the hardliners don’t get their way with spending cuts and rebelliously put this nation in a league with unstable states of the Third World by defaulting on our debts. That would be an embarrassing depletion of America’s credibility and a crippling blow not just to America’s economy but to the world’s. And if history is any guide, whether it’s his fault or not, it would be laid on Biden.

From the day this new Congress was sworn in, Joe Biden’s battles shifted from a few recalcitrant members of his own party— the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas of the world— to a Republican hard-right hellbent on blocking any landmark legislation he proposes. On top of that, after an unflinching and fruitful fight to sustain the heroic forces of Ukraine against the ruthless Russians, Biden now faces obstinate opposition from the far-right to the flow of military aid to Ukraine. He’s battling for national sovereignty and global democracy, they’re pushing back.

There are a few positives in this very very very bad week. Figures came out today showing that our annual inflation rate has slowed to a pace we haven’t seen since October, 2021. House Democrats have assured us that unlike the Republicans who boycotted the January 6th Committee, they will participate in the “Weaponization” hearings so that the radicals won’t completely control the narrative. And, as Russia appears to fade, Ukraine is still fighting back.

But none of that will take much pressure off the president. He’s just seeing the start of what you could call “the Republican Revenge Tour.” For Joe Biden, no good can come out of it. Maybe only an even worse week than the one he’s having now.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.