‘Morning Joe’ blasts Biden’s ‘stumbling and bumbling’ classified docs response
If Biden’s lost Scarborough …
MSNBC’s White House-friendly “Morning Joe” program tore into the administration’s “stumbling and bumbling” response to the classified documents debacle Monday, following the weekend revelation that more sensitive records were found at the president’s Delaware home.
“By stumbling and bumbling around, by not getting their timeline right … we just showed a graphic that says an unknown number of documents found in Biden’s garage,” said co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman. “No more unknown. No more unknown.
“At this stage, we’re two months in. They need to clean this up … amateur hour is over, they need complete transparency and they just mishandled it from day one,” he added.
The White House acknowledged on Saturday that more five classified records were found at the president’s Wilmington estate — bringing the total of documents discovered last week alone at the residence to six. Other sensitive documents were located in the home’s garage last month and at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington Nov. 2.
The White House counsel’s office has insisted that the administration turned over the documents to the National Archives as they were found and is cooperating with a Justice Department investigation helmed by special counsel Robert Hur.
Scarborough pointed out that the Biden administration’s piecemeal attempts to come clean about the documents are fueling suspicion among Republicans and others.
“Transparency, I think, works best for the Biden administration and works best for Biden himself because they find the documents, they report it immediately,” he said. “A far different situation than Donald Trump’s … It’s very clear to see politically and legally that there is a huge difference in the two cases. And yet Biden’s own worst enemy has been the way Biden’s staff and the way the Biden team has run this.”
Jonathan Lemire, Politico’s White House bureau chief and the host of MSNBC’s “Way Too Early,” said Democrats were frustrated at the “drip, drip, drip” of revelations about the records.
According to Lemire, Democrats have told him that the Biden people should have begun a search for any classified documents immediately after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 and recovered boxes of records taken from the White House in January 2021 to “make sure we don’t have a similar issue.”
“‘Let’s make sure we don’t have any stray documents laying around, even inadvertently.’ No search was done then. And it wasn’t until November when a staffer was just simply cleaning up the office at the Penn Biden Center and found the documents and suddenly, ‘We may have an issue here,’” Lemire said.
”And then even more Democrats [are saying], ‘Why did it take so long, even if that’s the first week in November? How are we now in mid-January?’ And what we just learned about more documents on Saturday, and it’s that drip, drip, drip that’s the problem right now.”
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