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      Here’s How Joe Biden Can Win Again

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      President Biden’s age is on the minds of American voters as they think about the 2024 election. It’s no wonder: In a poll I did last year, there was broad support (63 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independents) for establishing an upper age limit of 70 for any person to be sworn in as president. This past July, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of respondents believed the best age range for a U.S. president was in the 50s — well below Mr. Biden’s 80 and Donald Trump’s 77.As a pollster and strategist who has been involved in four Democratic presidential campaigns, including Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, I don’t believe that age will determine this election. But it is a formidable reality that Mr. Biden and his team must deal with and transcend, just as Ronald Reagan did at age 73 in his 1984 re-election race. Mr. Reagan passed that test, removing age as a distraction for his campaign and voters and making the contest about “morning in America,” our economic turnaround and our leadership in the world. The 2024 election is going to hinge similarly on core issues and a vision that speaks directly to the lives and hopes of voters.Getting past the age question won’t be easy. It will involve persuading voters in memorable ways and will require a deft touch. But this is a winnable race for the president, even if it sometimes seems his team is shielding him from the public. The fact is, he’s old. A failure to confront the issue risks reinforcing that impression rather than overcoming it. Americans will be watching him closely in big moments, like his trip to Israel this week to deal with one of the most significant crises of his presidency. The Biden team needs to get the president out in front of the public more, finding opportunities for him to talk about age with a directness and confidence that convinces people it isn’t the core issue. Talk about it now so you aren’t talking about it next summer, then use the fall debates in 2024 to deliver a Reaganesque line that puts the topic to bed.If Mr. Trump becomes Mr. Biden’s opponent, this task is simpler. They’re both old, so I think the question of age will become moot for a lot of voters. Winning presidential candidates learn quickly not to launch attacks that can come back and bite them. Take Mitt Romney’s debate-stage effort in 2012 to cast Mr. Obama as unfit to be commander in chief over his handling of a deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Obama’s stinging response won the president headlines praising his smackdown performance: “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that’s not how a commander in chief operates,” Mr. Obama said.It’s likely that many independent and swing voters will be less concerned with Mr. Biden’s and Mr. Trump’s ages than about the preponderance of legal issues facing Mr. Trump, which would seem to give Democrats the edge. Despite his dominance in the Republican race, a poll my firm conducted shortly after he was indicted on criminal charges for the fourth time found that 24 percent of his party’s voters said his legal issues made them less likely to vote for him. That’s four times the 6 percent of Republicans who defected from him in 2020. Even worse for Mr. Trump, 61 percent of independent voters said his legal problems made them less likely to vote for him.The RealClearPolitics polling average currently shows Mr. Trump up by less than a point over Mr. Biden, 45.3 percent to 44.5 percent. A year ahead of the election, that’s meaningless information. The party of Hillary Clinton has learned the hard way not to take a slight polling edge for granted. I was Mrs. Clinton’s pollster in 2016, when public polling had her about two percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump. She won 48 percent of the vote to his 45.9 percent but, of course, lost the Electoral College by losing three battleground states that are crucial for Democrats in presidential campaigns. The campaign’s leadership had ordered a stop to most in-depth polls in those battlegrounds during October, which left us blind to the state of play.Our country has split down the middle in its politics for decades now. When I was on Bill Clinton’s polling team for his 1996 re-election campaign, he won with 49.2 percent of the vote. When I was the lead pollster on Mr. Obama’s team in 2008, he won with 52.9 percent of the vote; in 2012 he won with 51.1 percent of the vote, making him only the fourth president in over a century to be elected and re-elected with more than 50 percent.So what will it take for Mr. Biden to win? From both wins and losses, I’ve learned that there are three things every candidate needs to remember: Campaigns are about big things, not small things. Campaigns are about the future, not the past. And campaigns are about the voters’ lives, not the candidate’s.For Mr. Biden, following that mantra means making this election a forward-looking choice built on a contrast of economic vision and values. More important, it means leaning into his greatest asset: his long record of working across the aisle.He built his career on doing the hard work of compromising with the other side to get things done for the American people. Since he took office in 2021, he won passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law to repair the nation’s roads, bridges and railways; bring high-speed internet to rural communities; and more, an achievement made possible by 32 Republicans who crossed the aisle (13 in the House and 19 in the Senate). He signed the most significant gun-safety legislation to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, with 29 votes from Republicans (14 in the House and 15 in the Senate).Those numbers may not sound like much, but in a country exhausted by political division and with him most likely up against a Republican opponent whose only game is to divide, it’s a critical advantage. By focusing on bipartisanship and doing less name calling about MAGA and the right, he would not just recite his accomplishments; he would bring focus to what government can do for the American people when both sides work together.Mr. Biden should also lean on his gifts of public empathy. Joe from Scranton is someone who understands that we can’t keep telling people that what they see and feel isn’t real. Month after month, the economic numbers of his presidency have provided evidence that our economy is recovering and our society is stable.But public opinion polling shows many Americans experiencing a sense of corrosive instability — worry that our rapidly changing economy and technological world may leave them behind, coupled with fears about crime and immigration. Connecting with those voters is about providing them with the tangible evidence that you’ve heard them, that you’re invested in improving their lives and that you have a vision for governing that addresses their fears and will create a better future for them and their families.During Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign, we faced a similar disconnect. The country was still in the throes of an economic crisis that began before he took office in 2009. We knew we couldn’t overstate claims about the improving economy because people weren’t feeling it yet. The campaign needed to focus on the future and lift up working- and middle-class Americans in a way that Mr. Romney, with his private-equity background, could not effectively rebut.From our research, we developed key principles for the campaign: Talk about a country facing a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those striving to get there. Talk about the importance of building an economy from the middle out, not the top down. Talk about an economy in which hard work pays, responsibility is rewarded and everyone gets a fair shot and a fair shake.One thing Mr. Biden should stop talking about: Mr. Trump. It’s tempting. It’s the red meat his base wants. But it’s not the job. The months of Republican debates and headlines about court cases against the former president will inflict damage without Mr. Biden having to say a word.Come August — when most Americans start paying attention to a November presidential election — if Mr. Trump is indeed the G.O.P. candidate, he can be depended on to continue his campaign of doom, destruction and despair.But despite the aberration of the 2016 election, I believe Americans want to hear about the values and beliefs that bring us together, not the things that drive us apart. Mr. Biden is uniquely able to communicate a credible message of hope that we might again be a country that works together rather than a nation that is mired in perpetual division. He is a man I know to be an optimist by nature, and he believes unity trumps division. So do I.Joel Benenson is a veteran Democratic adviser who was the pollster on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and chief strategist and pollster on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Plot Trump Lost

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump for longer than 30 seconds? Longer than a clip sailing by in a tweet or a TikTok or packaged on the evening news? Lovers and haters alike seem filled to the brim with information about this man, unable to take in any more or alter their view of him.If you haven’t lately, he talks about the 2020 election a lot, still, but in ways that are a little different from before.Onstage, sometimes he refers to it with a certain subversive lightness, like another thing he’s not supposed to repeat but does, like a punchline. “You speak up a little bit about the election — ‘He’s an insurrectionist,’” he said in Waterloo, Iowa, this month, to laughs.But sometimes the 2020 election as Mr. Trump describes it sounds like a crisis he cannot move beyond. “Had the election not … turned out the way it did — I’ll try to be nice,” he began in Iowa. “Had it not turned out the way it did — you know when I say that, I mean,” he said, then with more emphasis, “had the election not been rigged.”What if, what if. He was in an open-air warehouse on a windy, 51-degree Saturday and would return to the hypothetical again that day — had the election not been rigged, if the election hadn’t been rigged. The enthused crowd sat; eight Secret Service agents stood, flanking an elevated Mr. Trump and staring off into crisscrossing directions under an arched ceiling. The overall effect of the event — standing security detail, a big American flag against a cinder-block wall, “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys playing and at least eight people in T-shirts with the Trump mug shot on them — was like a concentrate of a Trump rally. We’ve been doing this so long as a country, he and we have become more abstract, operating in shorthand and fragments of the past.Onstage, he seamlessly moved between prepared text to talking about whatever was on his mind, then back in disorienting intimations, suggestions, asides and loops. “Household incomes rose by a record $6,000 a year under Trump, right? I love that mug shot. I love that beautiful woman right there with the mug shot,” he said at another event that afternoon, in a hotel convention center in Cedar Rapids.He’ll talk about how the day he stopped calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” was a good one for her, she celebrated that night, now he calls her beautiful, because she’s a great beauty — then with no variation or substantive transition beyond the word “but,” he goes back to prepared stuff about how the 30-year mortgage rate recently hit a 23-year high. A long riff about what prosecutors aren’t doing to the radical left, straight back into “but we delivered record increases in real family income.”Amid these digressions and jokes and tales about negotiations with foreign leaders, he’ll bring back a menacing clarity of voice so that each precise word about the indictments against him is all you can hear or think: “People realize that they’re fake and phony and they’re political.”As he used to say, he once had a nice life, which he gave up for this. But Mr. Trump said it the other night in West Palm Beach with the added dimension that “instead, I sit it in courtrooms.” He talks about how all the cases against him are connected and how they’re really after you, the voter, and he’s just standing in the way — though each time he said this in Iowa, his heart didn’t seem quite in it.He brings a lot more emotion to tracing everything going wrong in the world back to: What if they hadn’t rigged the election? Then, in the dream sequences that pepper Mr. Trump’s speeches, there would be no inflation, no war in Ukraine, no bad Afghanistan withdrawal. Forget what we’ll do now or what we should have done then.The broad themes Mr. Trump is working with right now are that Mr. Biden picked economic policies that are crazy and because the Afghanistan withdrawal was so bad, the world has fallen apart — but with 2020 always lurking nearby. “All these things wouldn’t have happened if the election weren’t rigged,” he said in Cedar Rapids. “If the election weren’t rigged, you wouldn’t have Ukraine, you wouldn’t have had any of it. It’s so sad what they’ve done. There’s plenty of evidence. It’s all there. You know it.” In Florida last week, he added one to the mix: Hamas would never have attacked Israel. “You’re in a different world,” he said in West Palm Beach, “and it’s getting worse.”Being assigned to one of the juries in these pending Trump cases would change someone’s life — a dividing line between the past and future. “Don’t use your real names with each other,” the judge told jurors at the beginning of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial. “My advice to you is not to identify yourselves, not now and not for a long time,” he told them on the last day.“When I would get in my car, I was like, ‘I just left that, and I have to just go do my job now?’” one member of the Fulton County special grand jury told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I just know things that are hard to know.’”If people seem to be unable to take in more information about Mr. Trump and if the election is shaping up to be a familiar repeat, the year ahead will not be. He views the world as one of perception, to be worked over and over again until it bends. To serve as a juror in this random selected position of authority, tasked with assessing what happened, for it to be your responsibility to step outside yourself and whatever you think about Mr. Trump and make decisions about him and the law is a weight that only a few dozen people will know. The rest of us will be outside in the chaos of perception, trying to make sense of it.And he’ll be inside and outside, perhaps still revisiting the decisive moment of his defeat and linking it with anything that’s gone wrong. “We would have had a deal with Iran. We would have had no inflation. Russia would have never ever in a million years gone into Ukraine,” he said in Waterloo. His sense of what if, what if, can draw a listener back further, to think about how much “what if” still shapes politics.The entire Republican Party has, for nearly a decade now, operated on a dream sequence of the possibility of passive collapse. What if he just went away? When Joe Biden ran in 2020, his campaign looked to correct the decisive mistake of the past: Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. That was not, Mr. Biden often suggested, who we were. The implicit promise was the restoration of morality and normality. What if the 2020 election could be a reset?It’s easy to follow all these dream sequences into another: What if Mr. Trump could just return to New York, had never run for president, were no longer talking in loops? What if the country didn’t have to live through a remix of the 2020 election or change people’s lives by putting them on juries or live in the unknown we have not yet really reckoned with of what it will be like to live through the trials of our former president?This election seems like the one before only on the surface. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and the rest of us keep getting older; everything and everyone seems a little fried. Eight years in, there’s nothing that weird about seeing people wearing T-shirts with his mug shot staring back at him while a Backstreet Boys song from 1999 plays, the entire Republican field sounding like echoes of Mr. Trump as he talks about Mrs. Clinton, moving in and out of the present and back in time sonically.Mr. Trump remembers what things used to be like. “A normal politician gets indicted, and we’ve seen it hundreds of times over the years,” he said in Iowa, though he’s done versions of this elsewhere, too.He described that guy’s approach after getting “the pink slip” and dropped his voice into a washed monotone. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce that I am going home to my family. I will fight, I will fight, fight, fight for the rest of my life.’”“Do you understand? This is standard,” he said. “With me, it’s different.”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden, Trump and the 2024 Field of Nightmares

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      In the bottom of the 10th inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, with the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 5-3, Red Sox manager John McNamara sent Bill Buckner — a great hitter dealing with terrible leg problems that made him gimp his way around first base — back out to play the infield instead of putting in Dave Stapleton, Buckner’s defensive replacement. A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears.Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Meaning that if you place a player where he shouldn’t be, or try to disguise a player’s incapacity by shifting him away from the likely action, or give a player you love a chance to stay on the field too long for sentimental reasons, the risk you take will eventually catch up to you, probably at the worst possible moment.Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. Consider the dreadful-for-liberals denouement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career, where nobody could tell a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court justice who had survived cancer that it was time to step aside and Democrats were left to talk hopefully about her workout regimen as she tried to outlast Donald Trump. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.Or consider the Trump presidency itself, in which voters handed a manifestly unfit leader the powers of the presidency and for his entire term, various Republicans tried to manage him and position him and keep him out of trouble, while Dave Stapleton — I mean, Mike Pence — warmed the bench.This managerial effort met with enough success that by the start of 2020, Trump seemed potentially headed for re-election. But like a series of line drives at an amateur third baseman, the final year of his presidency left him ruthlessly exposed — by the pandemic (whether you think he was too libertarian or too Faucian, he was obviously overmastered), by a progressive cultural revolution (which he opposed but was helpless to impede), by Biden’s presidential campaign and finally by his own vices, which yielded Jan. 6.Naturally, Republicans are ready to put him on the field again.These experiences set my expectations for what’s happening with Democrats and Biden now. The increasing anxiety over Biden’s lousy poll numbers, which I discussed in last weekend’s column, has yielded a defensive response from Biden partisans. Their argument is that the president’s decline is overstated, that his administration is going well and he deserves more credit than he’s getting and that, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser suggests, the press is repeating its mistake with Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and making the age issue seem awful when it’s merely, well, “suboptimal.”I do not think Biden’s decline is overstated by the media; by some Republicans, maybe, but the mainstream press is, if anything, treading gingerly around the evident reality. But I do think Biden’s defenders are correct that the effect of his age on his presidency has been, at most, only mildly negative. It’s limited his use of the bully pulpit and hurt his poll numbers, but his administration has passed major legislation, managed a foreign policy crisis and run a tighter ship than Trump.Where I have criticisms of Bidenism, they’re mostly the normal ones a conservative would have of any liberal president, not special ones associated with chaos or incompetence created by cognitive decline.But in running Biden for re-election, Democrats are making a fateful bet that this successful management can simply continue through two sets of risks: the high stakes of the next election, in which a health crisis or just more slippage might be the thing that puts Trump back in the White House, and the different but also substantial stakes of another four-year term.“The ball will always find you” is not, of course, an invariable truth. It’s entirely possible that Biden can limp to another victory, that his second term will yield no worse consequences than, say, Ronald Reagan’s did, that having managed things thus far, his aides, spouse and cabinet can see the next five years through.But the Trump era has been one of those periods when providence or fate revenges itself more swiftly than usual on hubris — when the longstanding freedom that American parties and leaders have enjoyed, by virtue of our power and pre-eminence, to skate around our weak spots and mistakes has been substantially curtailed.Even Millhiser’s proposed analogy for the fixation on Biden’s age, the Clinton email scandal, fits this pattern. “Her emails” hurt Clinton at the last because they became briefly entangled with the Anthony Weiner sex scandal. This was substantively unfair, since nothing came of the Clinton emails found on Weiner’s laptop. But it was dramatically fitting, a near-Shakespearean twist, that after surviving all of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals the Clinton dynasty would be unmade at its hour of near triumph by a different, more pathetic predator.So whether it’s certain or not, I can’t help expecting a similarly dramatic punishment for trying to keep Biden in the White House notwithstanding his decline.That I also expect some kind of punishment from the Republicans renominating Trump notwithstanding his unfitness doesn’t make me inconsistent, because presidential politics isn’t quite the same as baseball. Unlike in a World Series, there need not be a simple victor: All can be punished; all of us can lose.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Dignified Silence Doesn’t Work Against Trump

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      Donald Trump is increasing his already overwhelming lead for the Republican nomination, and is tied with President Biden in a hypothetical general election face-off, according to recent polling.This is astonishing given Trump’s quagmire of legal trouble, but it is the logical result of a candidate running without forceful, widespread opposition and condemnation. His opponents, for varying reasons, have taken the strategic position of ignoring his predicament, fingers and toes crossed that he will succumb to self-injury.They’re wishing on an avalanche of “ifs.” But there’s no wishing in this kind of battle, no victory without confrontation.This reluctance to take on Trump has allowed him and his surrogates to develop a narrative of victimhood and justified vengeance while allowing the image of timidity and weakness to harden around his opponents like plaster.And with this failure to engage, this campaign of cowardice, Republican voters, already primed by Trump to disbelieve facts and believe conspiracy theories, are robbed of any debate that could help modulate their views.Those voters exist in a void of veracity, and Trump fills it with his version of truth: anti-truth.But not only are most of Trump’s Republican rivals avoiding attacking him over his various indictments, so is his Democratic one.Joe Biden refuses to comment on them. He and his campaign have chosen to keep their distance from the chaos and not feed into Trump’s false assertion that his legal woes originate from political animus.This idea of a dignified silence has a long political history, but its utility and efficacy is unclear in a modern context. It feels a bit like a “Happy Days” nostalgia in a “Walking Dead” reality.And yet the Biden campaign plows ahead with it. Just last week, the Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond reiterated the strategy: “We’re not going to focus on Donald Trump’s legal problems.”But Trump’s legal problems aren’t about parking tickets or child support payments; they’re about an ongoing assault on our democracy, and it is hard to square having the candidate who is campaigning on protecting our democracy not address the great threat to that democracy.And that threat isn’t simply about what has happened, but what could yet happen.In July, The Times reported that Trump and his allies plan on “reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands” if he regains the White House. Last week, The Associated Press reported that conservative groups, led by the Heritage Foundation, are drawing up plans to “dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with Trump’s vision,” should Trump be re-elected. Last year, Trump called for a “termination” of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election.Still, Biden adheres to a dignified silence approach, clinging almost religiously to the notion that voters will recognize and appreciate the difference between a restorer and a destroyer.That may well be the case. The continuity of the Republic as we know it may hang on it. But it’s perfectly reasonable to question the wisdom of that approach and to be apprehensive about it.On the campaign trail in 2019, Biden said he had counseled Hillary Clinton to “not get into” the topic of Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape during their second general election debate, “because it just drags it down.” As Biden put it, “Everybody knows who Donald Trump is.”On the debate stage, Clinton took the soft-pedal Biden approach. When asked about that video, Clinton gave a somewhat meandering answer, ultimately landing on the refrain that “everyone can draw their own conclusions at this point about whether or not the man in the video or the man on the stage respects women.”But Trump went on the attack. WikiLeaks had begun leaking John Podesta’s emails, and Trump made the emails a central argument.And as Rolling Stone put it in 2018, “The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape dominated headlines for roughly a week; WikiLeaks, on the other hand, was an unrelenting drumbeat of rumors and wild allegations that left conservatives in a perpetual state of fury.”Clinton, of course, would lose that election.The asymmetry in the way Trump and his opponents engage with each other gives Trump a big advantage. He unleashes his barbs nonstop, and erratically, until one of them hits. His opponents keep refusing to respond in kind, maintaining respectable restraint, while racking up political wounds.During a Labor Day speech, one that some saw as the president beginning to ratchet up his attack on Trump, Biden didn’t even mention his predecessor’s name, instead repeatedly referring to him as “the last guy.”Most of Trump’s opponents, both Republican and Democratic, are placing a risky bet, one that completely depends on the discernment of the American voter. That may, in the end, prove to be a brilliant tactical assessment, but I worry that it’s just as likely to be a tragic miscalculation.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Hillary Clinton Calls Trump Indictments a ‘Terrible Moment for Our Country’

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      Less than an hour after a grand jury in Atlanta returned indictments in the 2020 election interference case in Georgia, Hillary Clinton on Monday called the developments “a terrible moment for our country.”The indictment, released late on Monday evening, charges former President Donald J. Trump in a sprawling case. Before the charges were made public, Mrs. Clinton gave a previously scheduled late-night interview on MSNBC. She said that she felt “great profound sadness” that the former president had already been indicted on so many other charges that “went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.”“Do you feel satisfaction in that you warned the country, essentially, that he was going to try to end democracy?” the anchor, Rachel Maddow, asked Mrs. Clinton, a former secretary of state and former first lady.“I don’t feel any satisfaction,” Mrs. Clinton responded, adding that she did not know whether “anybody should be satisfied.” “The only satisfaction may be that the system is working, that all of the efforts by Donald Trump, his allies and his enablers to try to silence the truth, to try to undermine democracy have been brought into the light.”In addition to the Georgia case, Mr. Trump has been charged in federal court with carrying out a concerted effort in six states, including Georgia, to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory. He has been charged in a federal court in Florida with mishandling classified documents, and in state court in New York in relation to hush-money paid to a porn star during the 2016 campaign.Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s Democratic presidential rival in 2016, has been a target of Mr. Trump and his Republican allies as he has come under investigation.Since Mr. Trump became the first former U.S. president to face federal charges, Republicans have repeatedly referred to the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. But several official investigations have found that Mrs. Clinton did not systematically or deliberately mishandle classified material. In 2018, a report by the inspector general supported the F.B.I.’s decision not to charge Mrs. Clinton.On Monday night, she praised Mr. Biden’s leadership and fired back at a Republican Party that she suggested had lost its backbone and conscience, saying Americans needed to use the rule of law and elections “to defeat those who want to weaponize divisiveness, who want to undermine democratic values and institutions.” Mrs. Clinton described the attack on the nation’s election system as the most critical in a long line of efforts to undermine the public’s trust in voting and democracy. “What happened on Jan. 6 — ‘Don’t believe what you saw, believe what I tell you’ — those are all the hallmarks of authoritarian, dictatorial kinds of leaders,” she said, calling 2024 a crucial moment in defeating anti-American political ideas and values. More

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      The Prosecution of Donald Trump May Have Terrible Consequences

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      It may be satisfying now to see Special Counsel Jack Smith indict former President Donald Trump for his reprehensible and possibly criminal actions in connection with the 2020 presidential election. But the prosecution, which might be justified, reflects a tragic choice that will compound the harms to the nation from Mr. Trump’s many transgressions.Mr. Smith’s indictment outlines a factually compelling but far from legally airtight case against Mr. Trump. The case involves novel applications of three criminal laws and raises tricky issues of Mr. Trump’s intent, of his freedom of speech and of the contours of presidential power. If the prosecution fails (especially if the trial concludes after a general election that Mr. Trump loses), it will be a historic disaster.But even if the prosecution succeeds in convicting Mr. Trump, before or after the election, the costs to the legal and political systems will be large.There is no getting around the fact that the indictment comes from the Biden administration when Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party’s probable nominee.This deeply unfortunate timing looks political and has potent political implications even if it is not driven by partisan motivations. And it is the Biden administration’s responsibility, as its Justice Department reportedly delayed the investigation of Mr. Trump for a year and then rushed to indict him well into G.O.P. primary season. The unseemliness of the prosecution will likely grow if the Biden campaign or its proxies uses it as a weapon against Mr. Trump if he is nominated.This is all happening against the backdrop of perceived unfairness in the Justice Department’s earlier investigation, originating in the Obama administration, of Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia in the 2016 general election. Anti-Trump texts by the lead F.B.I. investigator, a former F.B.I. director who put Mr. Trump in a bad light through improper disclosure of F.B.I. documents and information, transgressions by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials in securing permission to surveil a Trump associate and more were condemned by the Justice Department’s inspector general even as he found no direct evidence of political bias in the investigation. The discredited Steele Dossier, which played a consequential role in the Russia investigation and especially its public narrative, grew out of opposition research by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.And then there is the perceived unfairness in the department’s treatment of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, where the department has once again violated the cardinal principle of avoiding any appearance of untoward behavior in a politically sensitive investigation. Credible whistle-blowers have alleged wrongdoing and bias in the investigation, though the Trump-appointed prosecutor denies it. And the department’s plea arrangement with Hunter came apart, in ways that fanned suspicions of a sweetheart deal, in response to a few simple questions by a federal judge.These are not whataboutism points. They are the context in which a very large part of the country will fairly judge the legitimacy of the Justice Department’s election fraud prosecution of Mr. Trump. They are the circumstances that for very many will inform whether the prosecution of Mr. Trump is seen as politically biased. This is all before the Trump forces exaggerate and inflame the context and circumstances, and thus amplify their impact.These are some of the reasons the Justice Department, however pure its motivations, will likely emerge from this prosecution viewed as an irretrievably politicized institution by a large chunk of the country. The department has been on a downward spiral because of its serial mistakes in high-profile contexts, accompanied by sharp political attacks from Mr. Trump and others on the right. Its predicament will now likely grow much worse because the consequences of its election-fraud prosecution are so large, the taint of its past actions so great and the potential outcome for Mr. Biden too favorable.The prosecution may well have terrible consequences beyond the department for our politics and the rule of law. It will likely inspire ever-more-aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposite party, to the detriment of sound government.It may also exacerbate the criminalization of politics. The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries.Many of these consequences of the prosecution may have occurred in any event because of our divided politics, Mr. Trump’s provocations, the dubious prosecution of him in New York State and Mr. Smith’s earlier indictment in the classified documents case. Yet the greatest danger comes from actions by the federal government headed by Mr. Trump’s political opponent.The documents case is far less controversial and far less related to high politics. In contrast to the election fraud case, it concerns actions by Mr. Trump after he left office, it presents no First Amendment issue and it involves statutes often applied to the mishandling of sensitive government documents.Mr. Smith had the option to delay indictment until after the election. In going forward now, he likely believed that the importance of protecting democratic institutions and vindicating the rule of law in the face of Mr. Trump’s brazen attacks on both outweighed any downsides. Or perhaps he believed the downsides were irrelevant — “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”These are entirely legitimate considerations. But whatever Mr. Smith’s calculation, his decision will be seen as a mistake if, as is quite possible, American democracy and the rule of law are on balance degraded as a result.Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work.Regrettably, in February 2021, the Senate passed up a chance to convict Mr. Trump and bar him from future office, after the House of Representatives rightly impeached him for his election shenanigans. Had that occurred, Attorney General Merrick Garland may well have decided not to appoint a special counsel for this difficult case.But here we are. None of these considerations absolve Mr. Trump, who is ultimately responsible for this mammoth mess. The difficult question is whether redressing his shameful acts through criminal law is worth the enormous costs to the country. The bitter pill is that the nation must absorb these costs to figure out the answer to that question.Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Where Is Melania Trump Now?

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      The former first lady has mostly retreated from public view — and steered clear of the campaign trail — while her husband fights to return to the White House and faces increasing legal peril.Since leaving the White House, Melania Trump’s world has gotten smaller.Just how she likes it.Cloistered behind the gates of her three homes, she sticks to a small circle — her son, her elderly parents and a handful of old friends. She visits her hairdressers, consults with Hervé Pierre, her longtime stylist, and sometimes meets her husband for Friday night dinner at their clubs. But her most ardent pursuit is a personal campaign: helping her son, Barron, 17, with his college search.What she has not done, despite invitations from her husband, is appear on the campaign trail. Nor has she been at his side for any of his court appearances.These are the days of Melania Trump, former first lady, current campaign spouse and wife to one of the most divisive figures in American public life. Unlike her predecessors, there are no plans for a speaking tour, a book or a major expansion of her charitable efforts, most of which, people close to the Trumps say, are not fully visible to the public. In her post-presidential life, Mrs. Trump wants what she could not get in the White House: a sense of privacy.Those efforts to retreat from public life have been complicated by her husband, who has turned her once again into a candidate’s spouse. As Donald J. Trump faces a possible third indictment, she has remained steadfastly silent about his increasing legal peril.While she supports his presidential bid, Mrs. Trump has not appeared on the trail since Mr. Trump announced his campaign in November and did not utter a public word about his effort until May, when she endorsed him in an interview with Fox News Digital.“He has my support, and we look forward to restoring hope for the future and leading America with love and strength,” she said.Her absence is a striking difference from the start of the first Trump campaign, when Mrs. Trump, wearing a white strapless dress, descended the golden escalator in front of her husband at his campaign kickoff at Trump Tower.Mrs. Trump remains in touch and friendly with a small group of people from her time in the White House, including the designer Rachel Roy and Hilary Geary Ross, the prominent Palm Beach networker and wife of Wilbur L. Ross, the president’s former commerce secretary. She remains especially close with her parents, who have an apartment at Trump Tower in Manhattan and have been spotted at Trump events at Mar-a-Lago, the Trumps’ private club and residence.“From her point of view and her friends’ point of view, she’s been through a lot and she’s come out a strong independent woman,” said R. Couri Hay, a publicist, who was an acquaintance of Mrs. Trump’s in New York before she headed to Washington. “She’s learned how to close the door and close the shutters and remain private. We don’t see a lot, we don’t hear a lot.”Mrs. Trump declined an interview request. This account is based on a dozen interviews with associates, campaign aides and friends, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private details of her life.People close to the family say Mrs. Trump’s lack of public support should not be confused with disapproval or indifference. She remains defensive of her husband, sharing his belief that their family has been unfairly attacked. Deeply distrustful of the mainstream media, she is an avid reader of the Daily Mail online, tracking Mr. Trump’s coverage in the conservative British tabloid.Mrs. Trump is particularly skeptical of the case by E. Jean Carroll, who won $5 million in damages in a trial accusing Mr. Trump of sexual abuse in the 1990s and defamation after he left the White House, according to two people familiar with her remarks. When Mrs. Trump saw coverage of her husband’s deposition in the case, she was livid at his legal team for failing to do more to raise objections. She has also privately questioned why Ms. Carroll could not recall the precise date of the alleged assault.Still, Mrs. Trump believes that despite the legal peril, Mr. Trump could return to the White House next year. In private, she has expressed curiosity about Casey DeSantis, the wife of Mr. Trump’s chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Ms. DeSantis is a close adviser to her husband and a regular presence at his events, and she has begun to campaign for him on her own. In one of her rare interviews, Mrs. Trump mused to Fox News about having a second chance at being first lady, saying she would “prioritize the well-being and development of children” if she reprised the role.Mrs. Trump has privately expressed curiosity about Casey DeSantis, who has spent time campaigning with her husband, Ron DeSantis.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBut she has not yet prioritized campaigning. Although she has expressed willingness to do events for her husband next year, she has so far refused his requests to join him on the stump.“I don’t think it’s going to be anything like what we’ve seen with Casey DeSantis,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump aide who quit on Jan. 6. “She’s not going to be throwing on jeans and walking in parades.”Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Trump adviser who is also close with Mrs. Trump, said the former first lady was “all in” on her husband’s candidacy and remained his “most trusted and most transparent adviser.” Both Trumps, she said, have privately discussed “priorities” for a second term.“I know few people as comfortable in their skin as Melania Trump,” said Ms. Conway, who is not working for the campaign. “She knows who she is and keeps her priorities in check. Melania keeps them guessing, and they keep guessing wrong.”That air of mystery extends to the gated communities of her husband’s clubs. In Palm Beach, Mrs. Trump is not a part of the social circuit, said Lore Smith, a longtime Palm Beach real estate agent who is a frequent visitor to the club.Unlike her modern predecessors, who attended barre or spinning classes, Mrs. Trump isn’t seen at the fitness center and isn’t known to have a trainer, according to other club regulars and former aides. She has long been a fan of days spent at the spa, but she is almost never spotted outside at the pool at either Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, Mr. Trump’s golf resort in New Jersey. Occasionally, she makes brief appearances at charity functions at Mar-a-Lago with her husband.“They very much keep to themselves behind the confines of Mar-a-Lago,” Ms. Smith said.Mrs. Trump isn’t part of the social scene at Mar-a-Lago, her husband’s private club. She is said to prefer New York. Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMrs. Trump remains closely involved with Barron’s education. He is enrolled in a private school in West Palm Beach and is beginning to look at colleges in New York.Mrs. Trump is said to prefer the city to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. She has been spotted going to her hairdresser and entering and exiting Trump Tower, which she does through a special side entrance and a private elevator.Outside the family residences, Mrs. Trump’s public schedule has been limited. She has done a handful of events, including collecting $500,000 in fees last year from the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative group that supports L.G.B.T. rights, and Fix California, an elections organization founded by Richard Grenell, a former senior Trump administration official. Mr. Grenell declined to comment on her appearance at the events.In February 2022, Mrs. Trump started “Fostering the Future,” a scholarship program for foster children aging out of the system. A person familiar with the program, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not offer details or disclose how many scholarships have been awarded, saying only that it was “more than two.” No charity with the name Fostering the Future or Be Best is registered in Florida or New York.Michael Weitzman, the first recipient of one of the scholarships, said he received the funding for four years at Oral Roberts University through a mentor, who knew a friend involved with the Trumps. “He asked if going to college was still a dream of mine,” said Mr. Weitzman, who spent his childhood living in 12 foster homes. “He said that he might know somebody really rich who might want to pay for me to go.”He did not fill out any kind of application but a day after the mentor floated the idea, he received an email from Mrs. Trump’s public relations team asking if he would participate in a Fox News interview with the former first lady, her first since leaving the White House. The scholarship was announced during the May 2022 interview, with Mr. Weitzman participating over Zoom. Mr. Weitzman, 26, said he had not had any interactions with Mrs. Trump since.”I haven’t met her in person. I wondered often if I would and would love to,” he said. “I’m beyond grateful. There’s no reason that anybody should have done this for me.”Mrs. Trump’s aides declined to discuss the details of her campaign plans, her charitable and business ventures and her views on her husband’s legal issues. Mr. Trump’s campaign declined to comment.Mrs. Trump and Barron Trump attended Mr. Trump’s campaign kickoff in November. Since then, Mrs. Trump has said little about her husband’s campaign for the White House. Andrew Harnik/Associated PressIn many ways, Mrs. Trump’s post-White House life is an extension of her style as first lady.From the start of her husband’s term, when she didn’t immediately move into the White House, Mrs. Trump often vacillated between two extremes: embracing her role or bucking all expectations associated with it.One of her most memorable moments was made through a fashion statement. While returning from a visit to a Texas border town to meet detained migrant children, she wore a jacket emblazoned with the phrase, “I really don’t care. Do U?”Much of her White House experience was marked by what people close to her described as disappointment and betrayal from friends, aides and even members of the Trump family. At times, her relationships with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, were strained, according to former aides. Since then, her former press secretary, Ms. Grisham, and a former aide and friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, have written tell-all books depicting her as icy and disengaged from the role.Those experiences pushed Mrs. Trump to retreat even further from the public, say people familiar with the family.Ms. Trump is “the most obviously unknowable first lady,” an author of a book on the subject said. “There’s something radical about it.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut that privacy may be hard to maintain under the scrutiny of a contested presidential primary and legal investigations.Last week, Chris Christie criticized both Trumps for a $155,000 payment to Mrs. Trump from a super PAC aligned with her husband’s campaign. A representative for the super PAC said that Mrs. Trump was hired in 2021 for “design consulting,” including choosing tableware, arranging settings and picking floral arrangements.“There’s grifting and then there’s Trump grifting,” Mr. Christie, the former New Jersey governor and most outspoken Trump critic in the 2024 Republican primary field, wrote on Twitter. “Undisputed champs.”Most of her public profile, conducted largely through her social media accounts, is focused on selling a variety of digital trading cards. Her NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, include digital drawings of her eyes, a broad-brimmed hat worn during a state visit, White House Christmas ornaments and a blue rose intended to commemorate National Foster Care Month.The majority of her tweets and Instagram posts directly promote the NFTs or a business called USA Memorabilia, which sells them. A day after Mr. Trump announced on his social media website Truth Social that he had received a target letter in the federal investigation into his efforts to thwart the transfer of power in 2020, Mrs. Trump’s only public comment was an announcement of a new “Man on the Moon” NFT collection.A portion of her proceeds is donated, though her aides would not provide details about the amount given or specify the charity.While first ladies often capitalize on the attendant fame, Mrs. Trump’s moneymaking venture is different from those of her predecessors, said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.”Michelle Obama was reportedly paid more than $60 million in a joint book deal with her husband, as well as commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches and signing a lucrative production deal with Netflix. Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton also sold their memoirs for millions. Their memoirs and paid speeches required the former first ladies to share some details about themselves, their views and their lives in the White House.By simply selling images, Mrs. Trump reveals nothing.That’s exactly how she likes it, Ms. Brower said.“She’s the most obviously unknowable first lady,” she said of Mrs. Trump’s public persona. “There’s something radical about it. First ladies are expected to want to please people and I’m not sure she really cares.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Verificación de la defensa de Trump en el caso de los documentos clasificados

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      El expresidente hizo comparaciones inexactas con otros políticos, tergiversó el proceso de clasificación y lanzó ataques con imprecisiones contra funcionarios.Horas después de declararse no culpable ante un tribunal federal en Miami por los cargos relacionados con su manejo de documentos clasificados, el expresidente Donald Trump defendió su conducta el 13 de junio con una serie de falsedades ya conocidas.En su club de golf en Bedminster, Nueva Jersey, Trump hizo comparaciones engañosas con otros personajes políticos, malinterpretó el proceso de clasificación y lanzó ataques con imprecisiones contra funcionarios.Aquí ofrecemos una verificación de datos de los argumentos de Trump sobre la investigación.Lo que dijo Trump“Amenazarme con 400 años en la cárcel por tener en mi poder mis propios documentos presidenciales, que es lo que prácticamente todos los presidentes han hecho, es una de las teorías legales más ofensivas y agresivas presentadas en la historia ante un tribunal estadounidense”.Falso. La Ley de Registros Presidenciales de 1978, que rige la conservación y retención de registros oficiales de los expresidentes, le da a la Administración Nacional de Archivos y Registros (NARA, por su sigla en inglés) total propiedad y control sobre los registros presidenciales. La legislación, que hace una distinción clara entre registros oficiales y documentos personales, se ha aplicado a todos los presidentes desde Ronald Reagan.La agencia señaló que “asumió la custodia física y legal de los registros presidenciales de las gestiones de Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush y Ronald Reagan cuando esos presidentes abandonaron el cargo”.De manera independiente, después de que Trump en repetidas ocasiones y engañosamente comparó su manejo de registros con el de su predecesor inmediato, la Administración Nacional de Archivos indicó en un comunicado que Barack Obama entregó sus documentos, tanto los clasificados como los que no lo estaban, de conformidad con la ley. La agencia también afirmó no estar al tanto de que se haya perdido alguna caja de registros presidenciales del gobierno de Obama.Lo que dijo Trump“El presidente toma la decisión de separar materiales personales de los registros presidenciales durante su mandato, y bajo su entera discreción”.Falso. La Ley de Registros Presidenciales distingue qué constituye material personal (como diarios o documentos de campañas políticas) y qué se clasifica como registros oficiales. No le da al presidente “discrecionalidad” para determinar qué es un registro personal y qué no lo es. Según la ley, el presidente saliente debe separar los documentos personales de los registros oficiales antes de abandonar el cargo.Agentes del FBI realizaron una búsqueda en el inmueble de Mar-a-Lago de Trump en agosto, más de un año después de que el abogado general de la NARA solicitó que se recuperaran materiales y tras meses de reiteradas consultas de funcionarios de la agencia y el Departamento de Justicia.Lo que dijo Trump“Se suponía que debía negociar con la NARA, que es exactamente lo que estaba haciendo hasta la redada en Mar-a-Lago organizada por agentes armados del FBI”.Falso. La Ley de Registros Presidenciales no establece un proceso de negociación entre el presidente y la NARA. La búsqueda realizada en la residencia de Trump en Florida, autorizada por los tribunales, ocurrió después de que se opuso en repetidas ocasiones a responder a las solicitudes del gobierno para que devolviera el material, incluso después de recibir una citación.Lo que dijo Trump“Biden envió 1850 cajas a la Universidad de Delaware, lo que dificultó la búsqueda, independientemente de quién la realizara. Se niega a entregarlas y se niega a permitir siquiera que alguien las vea, y luego dicen que se comporta con gran amabilidad”.Esta afirmación es engañosa. En 2012, Joe Biden le donó a la Universidad de Delaware 1850 cajas de documentos de la época en que fungió como senador del estado desde 1973 hasta 2009. A diferencia de los documentos presidenciales, que deben entregarse a la NARA al término del mandato del presidente, los documentos de los miembros del Congreso no están cubiertos por la Ley de Registros Presidenciales. Es común que los senadores y representantes les donen esos artículos a universidades, institutos de investigación o instalaciones históricas.La Universidad de Delaware convino en no darle acceso al público a los documentos de la época de Biden como senador hasta dos años después de su retiro de la vida pública. Pero el FBI sí revisó la colección en febrero como parte de una investigación independiente sobre el manejo de Biden de los documentos de gobierno y en colaboración con su equipo legal. The New York Times informó, en su momento, que continuaba el análisis del material y que todo parecía indicar que no contenía documentos clasificados.Lo que dijo Trump“Cuando la descubrieron, Hillary borró y ‘lavó con ácido’. Nadie hace eso, por los costos involucrados, pero es muy concluyente. Treinta y tres mil correos electrónicos en desafío a una citación del Congreso que ya se había emitido. La citación estaba ahí y ella decidió borrar, lavar con ácido y luego aplastar y destruir sus teléfonos celulares con un martillo. Y luego dicen que yo participé en una obstrucción”.Este es un argumento engañoso. Existen varias diferencias clave entre el caso de Trump y el uso por parte de Hillary Clinton de un servidor de correo electrónico privado cuando era secretaria de Estado, que Trump también describió de manera imprecisa.Una diferencia crucial es que varias investigaciones oficiales han concluido que Clinton no manejó indebidamente material clasificado de manera sistemática o deliberada, además de que un informe preparado en 2018 por el inspector general respaldó la decisión del FBI de no presentar cargos contra Clinton.En cambio, a Trump se le acusa de haber manejado indebidamente documentos clasificados y obstruir varias acciones del gobierno con el propósito de recuperarlos, así como de hacer declaraciones falsas ante algunos funcionarios. La acusación formal permitió tener acceso la semana pasada a fotografías de documentos guardados, en algunos casos, de manera veleidosa, como cajas apiladas en una regadera y otras en el escenario de un salón de baile frecuentado por visitantes.Según la investigación del FBI sobre el asunto, los abogados de Clinton le proporcionaron al Departamento de Estado en 2014 alrededor de 30.000 correos electrónicos relacionados con el trabajo y le ordenaron a un empleado que borrara todos los correos electrónicos personales de más de 60 días de antigüedad. En 2015, después de que el Times dio la noticia de que Clinton había usado una cuenta personal de correo electrónico, el comité de la Cámara de Representantes liderado por republicanos que estaba a cargo de la investigación de los ataques de 2012 contra puestos de avanzada estadounidenses en Bengasi, Libia, envió una citación en la que solicitaba todos los correos electrónicos de esa cuenta relacionados con Libia.Ese mismo mes, un empleado de la empresa que administraba el servidor de Clinton se percató de que en realidad no había borrado los correos electrónicos personales como se le pidió en 2014. Entonces procedió a aplicar un programa de software gratuito llamado BleachBit —no ácido real ni ningún otro compuesto químico— para borrar alrededor de 30.000 correos electrónicos personales.El FBI encontró miles de correos electrónicos adicionales relacionados con el trabajo que Clinton no le entregó al Departamento de Estado, pero James Comey, quien era director de la agencia en ese momento, declaró que no había “evidencia de que los correos electrónicos adicionales relacionados con el trabajo se hubieran borrado intencionalmente con el fin de ocultarlos”.Lo más seguro es que Clinton esté en desacuerdo con la aseveración de Trump de que el FBI y el Departamento de Justicia la “protegieron”, pues ha dicho que las acciones de Comey, junto con la interferencia rusa, le costaron las elecciones de 2016.Lo que dijo Trump“Por supuesto que exoneró a Mike Pence. Me da gusto. Mike no hizo nada malo, aunque tenía documentos clasificados en su casa. Pero lo exoneraron. Y el caso de Biden es otra cosa”.Esta afirmación es engañosa. Se encontraron documentos clasificados tanto en la casa del exvicepresidente Mike Pence en Indiana, en enero, como en la antigua oficina de Biden en un centro de investigación en Washington en noviembre y en su residencia de Delaware en enero. El Departamento de Justicia decidió no presentar cargos contra Pence; en cuanto a Biden, la investigación sobre su manejo de materiales está en proceso.Pero las diferencias entre esos casos y el de Trump son significativas, en particular en lo que respecta al volumen de documentos encontrados y la respuesta de Biden y de Pence.En la casa de Pence se encontró aproximadamente una decena de documentos marcados como clasificados. El FBI inspeccionó su casa en febrero, con su consentimiento, y encontró un documento clasificado más. No está claro cuántos documentos clasificados tenía en su posesión Biden, pero sus abogados han dicho que se encontró “un pequeño número” en su antigua oficina y alrededor de media docena en su casa de Delaware.En contraste, Trump tenía “cientos” de documentos clasificados, según la acusación formal del Departamento de Justicia, en la que se indica que algunos de los registros contenían información sobre los programas nucleares del país y “posibles vulnerabilidades de Estados Unidos y sus aliados a ataques militares”. En total, el gobierno ha recuperado más de 300 archivos con marcas de clasificado de su casa y su club privado de Florida.Otra diferencia es que representantes de Pence y Biden han dicho que no se percataron de que habían conservado esos documentos y no tardaron en informar a la NARA cuando lo descubrieron. Además, ambos cooperaron con funcionarios del gobierno para devolver los documentos y, al parecer, cumplieron voluntariamente con la realización de búsquedas en sus propiedades.En contraste, Trump se opuso en repetidas ocasiones, durante meses, a las solicitudes de devolver materiales y, según se lee en la acusación formal, desempeñó un papel activo para ocultarles a los investigadores documentos clasificados. La NARA le informó a Trump en mayo de 2021 que faltaban ciertos documentos presidenciales. Algunos agentes recuperaron 15 cajas de Mar-a-Lago en enero de 2022, pero sospechaban que todavía faltaban registros. Siete meses después, agentes del FBI registraron el inmueble de Florida y recuperaron más documentos.Lo que dijo Trump“A diferencia de mí, que contaba con total autoridad de desclasificación en mi carácter de presidente, Joe Biden, quien era vicepresidente, no tenía facultades para desclasificar y tampoco el derecho de tener en su posesión los documentos. No tenía ese derecho”.Esta afirmación es engañosa. Los vicepresidentes sí cuentan con facultades para desclasificar ciertos materiales, aunque el alcance de esas facultades no se ha cuestionado explícitamente ante los tribunales.Trump ha insistido en otras ocasiones en que contaba con facultades para desclasificar materiales sin necesidad de informarle a nadie. Existen procedimientos formales para levantar el secreto oficial de la información, pero el debate legal sobre si los presidentes deben cumplirlos no se ha resuelto, según el Colegio de Abogados de Estados Unidos y el Servicio de Investigación del Congreso, un organismo sin afiliación partidista. Un tribunal federal de apelaciones decidió en 2020 que “levantar el secreto oficial de materiales, incluso si lo hace el presidente, debe someterse a procedimientos establecidos”. No obstante, la Corte Suprema no ha emitido ningún fallo al respecto.De cualquier forma, cabe señalar que Trump siguió estos procedimientos con respecto a algunos documentos; por ejemplo, emitió un memorando el día previo al final de su mandato con el que desclasificó información relativa a la investigación del FBI sobre las relaciones de su campaña de 2016 con Rusia.Por otra parte, expertos legales han señalado que la clasificación de información sobre armas nucleares o “datos restringidos” se rige conforme a un marco legal totalmente distinto, la Ley de Energía Atómica. Esa ley no le otorga facultades explícitas al presidente para tomar la decisión unilateral de desclasificar secretos nucleares y establece un proceso estricto de desclasificación en el que participan varias agencias. No está claro si los documentos guardados en Mar-a-Lago incluían “datos restringidos”.Chris Cameron More