Viewers of Tuesday’s Late Night with Seth Meyers could be forgiven for getting dizzy as Politico White House bureau chief and MSNBC Way Too Early host Jonathan Lemire labeled President Biden’s classified document scandal “political” and “partisan,” but that there were real national security concerns, but also that Republicans have been showing “hypocrisy.”
Meyers led Lemire by asking for his take on the scandal, “What -- how do you see this story unfolding? Do you see this as a sort of universal idea that keeping classified material is bad or do you see it developing into sort of a partisan story where we're losing our focus?”
Lemire led off by downplaying the possibility Biden could find himself in legal jeopardy, “Yeah, we're certainly covering this every day, both on MSNBC and Politico and it is much more of a political story than it is a legal one for President Biden.”
After conceding that the documents should never have been in Biden’s garage, Lemire sought to contrast Biden’s situation with former President Trump’s, “But there's no sense of intent, that it was done deliberately, and President Biden, unlike his predecessor, has not been accused of trying to willfully obstruct efforts to get that material back. So we have now descended into very much a partisan story.”
However, Lemire acknowledged, “though national security implications to be clear, classified materials, that matters, that's serious stuff.”
Lemire continued zigzagging his way through the story as he concluded, “but this is more, much more about politics and we're seeing from a lot of Republicans, I mean, hypocrisy, there's no other way to say it they didn't care much at all about the hundreds and hundreds of documents found at Mar-a-Lago they seem to care quite a bit about this dozen or so found in Delaware and D.C.”
If Lemire truly believes that there are real national security implications, then how can it be portrayed as partisan? And even if one were to accept the allegation that Republicans are being hypocrites, why would that matter? If this is “serious stuff” then Trump and Republicans’ reactions do not matter as much as what Biden did.
This segment was sponsored by Google.
Here is a transcript for the January 17-taped show:
NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers
1/18/2023
1:18 AM ET
SETH MEYERS: Now, I want to ask, something obviously, you've been reporting on last week and into this week is the classified documents situation. Obviously, we were all well aware of what had happened with the documents that former President Trump was keeping at Mar-a-Lago. And now, we're having, obviously, a far smaller amount of documents, but real classified documents—
JONATHAN LEMIRE: Sure.
MEYERS: -- that were in President Biden's possession. What -- how do you see this story unfolding? Do you see this as a sort of universal idea that keeping classified material is bad or do you see it developing into sort of a partisan story where we're losing our focus?
LEMIRE: Yeah, we're certainly covering this every day, both on MSNBC and Politico and it is much more of a political story than it is a legal one for President Biden. There's certainly, at least from what we know of now, and it's still developing, we're still learning about it. It seems that there's about a dozen or so documents seemingly inadvertently packed away where they shouldn't have been and to be clear, the classified material should not be in a garage in a home in Wilmington, Delaware, that's never okay.
But there's no sense of intent, that it was done deliberately, and President Biden, unlike his predecessor, has not been accused of trying to willfully obstruct efforts to get that material back. So we have now descended into very much a partisan story though national security implications to be clear, classified materials, that matters, that's serious stuff, but this is more, much more about politics and we're seeing from a lot of Republicans, I mean, hypocrisy, there's no other way to say it they didn't care much at all about the hundreds and hundreds of documents found at Mar-a-Lago they seem to care quite a bit about this dozen or so found in Delaware and D.C.
