White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre held a news briefing on Tuesday as former President Donald Trump is arraigned for charges connected to his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Watch the briefing in the player above.
President Joe Biden's White House has dodged questions about the matter. His campaign doesn't respond to them. And Biden himself wants nothing to do with it. "I have no comment on what happened," he told reporters Friday while in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
The reticence reflects the precarious and unprecedented situation in which Biden finds himself: Just as Trump is the first former president to be charged by the federal government, Biden is the first incumbent to have his own administration indict his chief political rival.
While hardly unforeseen, Trump's indictment brought a fresh round of reminders throughout Biden world that the president does not want to be drawn into the drama with commentary of any sort. He's wary of providing fodder for Trump and his allies' efforts to portray the Justice Department as engaged in a politically motivated prosecution.
Eric Dezenhall, a longtime crisis communications consultant, said Biden's cautious path was prudent.
"There are certain positions you take not because they are persuasive but because they do the least damage," he said. "Any syllable Biden or the White House team utters will be used in court and politically to validate the witch hunt narrative."
Biden, who made restoring the independence of the Justice Department a central campaign promise in 2020, now aims to reinforce that principle as both a matter of politics and policy.
"I have never once — not one single time — suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge," Biden said Thursday. "I'm honest."
Later that evening, the White House said, the president learned of the 37 felony counts filed against Trump by a Miami grand jury through news coverage of Trump's announcement that he'd been summoned to surrender on Tuesday.
Asked Friday whether he had spoken to Attorney General Merrick Garland about the case, Biden replied curtly.
"I have not spoken to him at all," he told reporters. "I'm not going to speak to him."
Further complicating matters for Biden is that he faces his own special counsel probe into classified documents discovered at his home and former office. The circumstances were markedly different: Unlike Trump, Biden voluntarily returned the documents to the federal government.
Meanwhile, the president's son, Hunter, faces an ongoing Justice Department probe into his finances and the purchase of a firearm while under the influence of illegal substances.
Republicans defending Trump have already sought to accuse Biden of directing the prosecution, and they're alleging a double standard in how the Justice Department brings cases.