republicans will say, i think, somewhat justifiably, if you go back and look at hillary clinton and some of the previous episodes, republicans are prosecuted and democrats aren t. that makes a huge perception problem for the justice department. it is interesting because i remember the meet the press this week that said the pence documents were good for biden and great for trump. i thought it was brilliant because what you see is a muddying of the waters. it is hard for americans to see classified documents floating out there and think maybe the issue is not just the individuals but how we handle classified documents. there is the issue of lower overclassification, but the big question when i talk to people is how are we actually handling classified documents and who is in charge of tracking them? the bigger issue i felt like in our poll if you were the biden white house is just you don t ever want to be sort of on the same level as trump. you don t ever want that. that feeling. a
special counsel because he believes the investigation requires that independent decision-maker and not because he s worried about creating the right look. it s an interesting problem with regard to the pence documents. must you appoint a special counsel every time now someone retains classified documents is a possible candidate for president? i don t know. while i have you, barbed, i m curious as to what you make of what we have been hearing from the fulton county da. former president donald trump spoke to one of our affiliates and essentially said he s not necessarily worried at all about it, just worried more politically than anything else. we know the fulton county da essentially said decisions are eminence. for future defendants to be treated fairly, it s not appropriate at this time to have this report released. how worried should he be? if you read the tea leaves,
there are factors related to president biden s situation and former president trump s that make this different. the question is who would be the special counsel. they re reviewing that right now and they ll make the decision. at some point the special counsel not that special anymore. may be on that road. paula, thank you. joining us now white house bureau chief for the washington post. as we look at how things stand, i was having the conversation before we knew about the pence documents, i wonder if the former presidents are looking to see if they have anything at home. we know representatives for former presidents clinton, bush and obama say they turned over
going to have a special counsel here and treat this case fairly, what i hope congress is going to focus on is how do we fix it. do we overclassify things? maybe we do. do we need a better way to track documents? i think that s right. hopefully that s the focus. michael, just given your legal background, looking backwards given that you have investigations of trump and biden and presumably pence now. for an attorney general this is a legal decision and a political one. with each new discovery, is an indictment for anyone less likely? absolutely. i feel like once they found the biden documents it neutralized the trump case. when they found the pence documents, it neutralizes the case against biden. some of them have voluntarily
we ve seen it on republicans and democrats. in this context, we ve not seen selective outrage on the democratic side. i thought it was remarkable that senator blumenthal, senator manchin, and senator durbin were quite not generous in their characterizations of president biden s mishandling. of course, it could ve been a staff errror. even saying that president biden himself mishandled these materials, i think it s premature until such time a determination is made by the justice department. we do know that donald trump refused to request after request, to the point where a subpoena had to be issued. the fbi had to go into mar-a-lago and take those documents back, because he refused and insisted on keeping those documents. do you think that this discovery of the pence documents influences the case against the investigation of the former president s documents? it s obviously very different. the biden and pence case are probably more similar in the