Former Clinton administration adviser David Gergen believes President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents risks doing very real damage to him.
On CNN’s AC360, host Anderson Cooper welcomed the veteran political operative on to discuss the issue. Cooper mentioned the potential “political fallout” of consistent revelations more of documents being found in locations Biden used after his time as vice president.
“How big a mess is this for the Biden administration?” Cooper asked.
Gergen responded, “It’s very, very big. Not legally but politically, it’s a very, very big deal.”
He continued:
This is a president that was marching upward for the first time in his presidency. He got his numbers up. People are feeling better about the economy. There are all sorts of reasons to believe that he can now present himself–the fears that people like me have about how old he is and can he govern well? Those fears would be dissipated if he were able to stay on that track.
Gergen called the classified documents reporting a “gigantic story” and questioned why the president’s team did not make more of an attempt to get ahead of it.
“The Biden people, they may be making a big mistake, Anderson,” Gergen said. “I may be wrong about this. They’ve done a wonderful job being cooperative with the government, and they’ve done it by the books. I don’t think sitting there hunkering down now, just acting like it’s not out there is good. They’re going to get creamed doing that.”
Cooper called the appointment of a special counsel in the case “unpreventable,” but questioned why Biden did not announce that documents had been found in multiple locations all at once to avoid a “drip” of reporting on it.
“You would think they might have just, you know, announced that all at once,” he said.
Gergen responded, “That long delay in putting it out there is going to encourage people to believe, ‘What are they hiding?’”
Watch above, via CNN.
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