Paying attention to politics in America right now is like keeping a close eye on the ball during a tennis match — your head is constantly moving from one side to the other. And in the end, no matter who wins, you wind up with a massive headache. See, for example, the growing list of current and/or one-time presidents and vice presidents who have been caught hoarding classified documents. It’s a list that includes Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and, most recently, Mike Pence — much to Steve Bannon’s annoyance.
The trend — at least the trend of being caught with top-secret documents you have no right to have in your possession — began with Trump, as we all know from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. (It’s ok though, because Trump says he was able to declassify documents with his mind.) It didn’t help the Democrats’ case for coming down on Trump when, in the intervening months, classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president started popping up in all sorts of places, including the garage where POTUS keeps his kick-ass Corvette. (For the record: Kooky Rudy Giuliani thinks Obama planted them.)
Republicans — even those who initially claimed Trump having those documents in non-secure places was no big deal — really sunk their teeth into the hypocrisy of Biden’s document stash, but said it was worse because Biden was only VP at the time.
But now the ball has bounced back into the Dems’ court as a cardboard cutout with a heartbeat Pence has forked over the classified documents he had sitting around his home in Indiana. Which has Bannon seeing red.
As Raw Story reports, Trump’s shower-hating former strategist posted a link to The Daily Mail’s story about Pence’s brush with misbehavior with the line “Judas Pence attempts to provide cover for Biden.”
While there’s no evidence that Pence just randomly threw together some papers in order to take the heat off of Biden — or to put them on more equal footing, should Pence make a run for president in 2024 — Bannon’s social media-based outrage had some people thinking it was all a bit performative.
As Rodric Hurdle-Bradford wrote for Raw Story, one theory is that Bannon’s “outrage” over the situation is simply an attempt “to deflect attention from his current case and the charges that he fraudulently obtained donations for the Build the Wall Campaign and misappropriated those funds for the unfinished project. Bannon is facing charges of conspiracy, money laundering and scheming to defraud investors.”
Whatever the case, the discovery of Pence’s document stands in direct contrast to his repeated assertions that he did not and would not ever take classified documents from the White House.
Question: Did you take any classified documents with you from the white house?
Pence: I did not. pic.twitter.com/hbErVijbXt— Acyn (@Acyn) January 24, 2023
(Via Raw Story)