In putting together a history of the Biden administration, you could do worse, I suppose, than simply stringing together all the fake “Ron Klain memos” that I sometimes write here.
Below is the latest phony missive, based on reporting and analysis of what is going on.
If you want to hear more about the “memo", tune in at 10am ET this morning to Michael Smerconish’s SiriusXM radio program, where I will be making my weekly appearance. (True.)
We will take a brief break here, and I will be back with the latest “Ron Klain memo,” right after this.
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TO: JRB
FROM: Ron Klain
DATE: 1/11/23
RE: Silver linings playbook
I know you got in after midnight last night. You have your daily intel briefing this afternoon and nothing else on your public schedule.
We remain very vigilant at all battle stations over this classified document bullsh*t. I know both you and the First Lady want to keep legal bills and legal peril to a minimum.
Here’s the reality: Although the document thing is not ideal, current circumstances really reduce the threat this poses to us and you – and there are in fact some upsides to it all!
Yes, it complicates the life of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General. Their prosecution decision on Trump was always going to be tricky, and now surely an indictment is less likely. We are, of course, staying out of it, following closely your longstanding instruction, with which you know I agree, to avoid any action by the White House, including the counsel’s office, that would open the door to our enemies credibly accusing us of interfering in an investigation.
The reason the discovery of the documents is not a problem is that it juxtaposes you with Trump and with his document decisions. In the minds of the press, thanks to our early and consistent spin, this is about Team Biden handling the situation right compared to Team Trump handling it corruptly.
Every media outlet has a main bar emphasizing the differences and most have sidebars detailing how the cases are not at all the same, (the Washington Post has two of them and counting!). All of those stories are great for us. Even the New York Post ends its story like this:
While the case is drawing comparisons to the allegations that Trump held onto roughly 150 classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, the promptness of Biden’s attorneys sets the two cases apart, national security lawyer and former federal prosecutor Bradley Moss told the Post.
“These two cases are similar in that both involve constitutional officers who were sloppy in how their staff relocated records after they left office: Mr. Biden in 2017 and Mr. Trump in 2021,” Moss said. “The clear distinction so far, and we need to see all the details still, is that Mr. Biden’s team did the proper thing by immediately notifying security authorities and having the documents returned.”
Comparatively, it took an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022 to recover boxes of classified documents from Trump’s office and a storage room at the Palm Beach resort after the Archives said it contacted Trump lawyers in an effort to retrieve documents taken when he left the White House the previous year.
“Mr. Trump and his team delayed, obfuscated and at one point submitted a false statement to the FBI in an 18 month saga before the Mar-a-Lago raid,” Moss said.
Despite this, our media friends are digging around some to find out more of what happened. We will stay vigilant. The metrics we are using to determine if the danger is getting high: Do the Washington Post or New York Times start writing about the (international) funding of the Penn Biden Center – or include a diagram of the building and the office that shows how unsecure it was.
So far, so good.
As for the upside….
This story is emerging as the House Republicans are ramping up their investigations. The timing for us couldn’t be better. Just as they are trying to establish in the minds of the media and the country that their probes of you and us are non-political and in the public interest, they are rushing to judgment about something the public will never care about that explicitly compares you (favorably) to Donald Trump!
Yes, again, this might help Trump out, but you think the parallel to your predecessor is bad for us? It makes it good!
We are rebuilding old muscle memory for the press in a new context on what could not be more favorable terrain for us.
Once again, you are the guy who is not as bad as Trump. “You versus Trump????!!! That is a home game for us with the media. This is gold for our fight with House Republicans and gold for the reelect.
“The guy not as bad as Trump” worked in 2020. Now you’re the guy who is not as bad as Trump or DeSantis or Jim Jordan. And you are the guy who stands up to Matt Gaetz, unlike Kevin McCarthy. That’s a winning image with the public and the press, even for (especially for) an 80-year-old warrior.
Our allies are all on board, doing a version of your famous 2008 line about another of our favorite Republicans, where you said “Rudy Giuliani - there's only three things he [needs] to make ... a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”
Democrats are very pumped up to fight this stuff. So far, Congressman McGovern wins the prize in the “a noun and a verb and ‘MAGA extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party’” competition, with this gem in the New York Times about the House majority’s new investigative committee:
Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the panel was more akin to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, which demonized Americans suspected of being sympathetic to communism.
“I call it the McCarthy committee, and I’m not talking about Kevin; I’m talking about Joe,” Mr. McGovern said, adding: “This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the MAGA extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense.”
If this all goes right, we can establish the template that all of these House probes are just political distractions from the needs of real Americans, without even having to use all the oppo on Jordan and Comer that we have stored up. We can save it for later.
This is all made easier, of course, by the unity the Democrats have, rolling out of the momentum of the midterms into the McCarthy debacle, and the elevation of all these extremists into power in the House.
There’s a great AP story out this morning about our unity.
Our pal Steve, as usual, is right and a little bit too honest, maybe, with this:
[F]ormer New York Rep. Steve Israel, who was a top Pelosi adviser, predicted that additional divisions within the House GOP would make it easier for Democrats to find common ground.
“I expect that House Republicans will pursue a vitriolic agenda that pleases their own base and that will keep Democrats united for the next two years,” said Israel, who headed the House Democratic campaign arm from 2011 to 2015 and now directs the Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.
But the best part of the piece is the kicker quote from Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the Bernie offshoot Our Revolution:
Geevarghese struck a … conciliatory tone, saying Our Revolution has enjoyed a strong working relationship with Biden despite it having grown out of Sanders’ 2016 White House bid.
“There’s a conversation that’s been happening where progressive feel like we have an opening with Joe Biden to press our priorities,” Geevarghese said. “We may not win everything. But we’re a partner in the process.”
Bruce hates the phrase, even as a joke, but our Triangulation Lite plan to steal from the Clinton playbook and make the second two years of your first term about going to the center and playing the extremes of both parties off of each other and off of us is right on track.
There is nothing the Gang of 500 likes more than a president playing inside the 40 yard lines. Look at David Ignatius’ attaboy column on our immigration shift, and expect more of that. And we can do all this without losing the Hispanic vote, the union vote, or any other base vote, thanks in no small part to the weakness and cravenness of Kevin McCarthy.
In the short term, on some of the big fights of 2023, not only is the Dominant Media going to be with us, but so is the conservative commentariat. They all are with us on raising the debt ceiling. They all are with us on military aid to Ukraine (read Marc Thiessen scolding McCarthy on that already).
All of this sets us up for the State of the Union being a huge win for you. You can use our “unify and vilify” boilerplate with impunity. The cutaways of Matt Gaetz and George Santos and the rest will be irresistible catnip to the pool director, the Republican smirks and hisses and groans sending our dial-a-meters into the stratosphere.
I can’t guarantee that Marjorie Taylor Greene will shout out “YOU LIE!” at any point during your address -- but a Jewish boy from Indiana who made it to his dream job in the White House can dream a bit, now can’t he?
Have a great workout!
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ESSENTIAL READING
* None.