UPDATE: Two Days After Proof Framed the D.C. Documents Dustup As Concerning Federal Regulations Regarding NARA and VPOTUSes, a Second VPOTUS Is Snared By the “NARA Trap”

Proof presaged today’s major breaking news: that draconian federal regulations regarding NARA and vice presidents all but ensure outgoing vice presidents will accidentally retain sensitive documents.

ABOVE: Former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence (R-IN).

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Less than two days after a breaking news report at Proof that reframed the document “scandal” currently plaguing Joe Biden as a problem with federal regulations dealing with NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration) and vice presidents in particular—an esoteric revelation that nevertheless could immediately aid Biden and his administration, as well as the Democratic Party, in distinguishing between the small number of sensitive and classified documents outgoing vice president Biden accidentally retained in 2017 from the more than sixty boxes of sensitive and classified documents premeditatedly stolen by outgoing president Donald Trump over a period of months in late 2020 and early 2021—the major breaking news today is that Vice President Mike Pence also had sensitive and classified documents in his possession after he left office in 2021.

Here’s the CNN report, and here (below) a CNN graphic that adequately summarizes it:

{Note: As Proof readers will be aware, among the many other distinctions between the Biden and Trump cases are that Team Biden’s first discovery of wrongly retained documents was revealed to NARA within twenty-four hours, while Trump hid his massive stash of stolen documents in whole or in part from NARA, DOJ, and the FBI for over a year and a half.}

It’s now incumbent upon Biden’s administration and the Democratic Party to publicly empathize with rather than condemn Pence for having documents in his possession that he was not entitled to have—as this breaking news brings into high relief all of the distinctions between the Biden and Trump cases that the former has thus far (in his own person and through subordinates) struggled to articulate in a meaningful way.

The simplest and most correct narrative, now, is this one: NARA, per its regulations, offers round-the-clock expert consulting and even round-the-clock manual labor to assist outgoing American presidents with handling and (as appropriate) retaining or surrendering sensitive and classified documents, while vice presidents are offered no assistance at all. This ensures that vice presidents will accidentally end up with documents they should not, even as it gives former presidents the best opportunity imaginable to get things right.

That Donald Trump did not, nevertheless, get things right—indeed, he shunned all aid from NARA—only further inculpates him, as do all the facts surrounding his case that indicate he stole a large number of documents, over a long period of time, via a course of conduct he personally oversaw, and under circumstances in which he was carefully curating what he took from the White House. That he rejected free NARA aid on top of all this underscores that he didn’t want his deliberate misconduct to be ascertained.

By comparison, outgoing vice presidents Biden and Pence were almost guaranteed to run afoul of records-retention regulations because (a) unlike Donald Trump, their subordinates oversaw their “off-boarding” process with respect to documents, and (b) those subordinates had no expert advice or manpower to call on in their time of need.

Democrats and Biden have one chance to change the narrative—and justly so—in a situation that’s rapidly spiraling out of control because of major-media bothsidesism.

And that urgent narrative sea change starts with empathetically, rather than cynically, speaking out about the situation former vice president Pence now finds himself in.

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