Biden’s awkward silence on Trump’s legal woes – and what it could mean for 2024

All signs point to a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

But despite their likely inevitable round two face-off, and the fact that the former president actively schemed to try and prevent Mr Biden from occupying the Oval Office, the incumbent president has stayed mostly silent when it comes to Mr Trump’s mounting legal woes.

But how much longer can Mr Biden afford to keep quiet on his chief rival’s criminal culpability?

During Mr Trump’s third arraignment in a year for his efforts to try and overturn the 2020 election results, Mr Biden was vacationing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. When a CNN reporter asked Mr Biden while he was riding his bike if he would watch Mr Trump’s indictment, he responded by saying only “no.”

Similarly, as a grand jury in Georgia indicted Mr Trump and 18 of his allies on Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO), the former president stayed quiet. Instead, Mr Biden has sought to keep his focus on celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, his signature climate change and health care bill.

Conversely, Vice President Kamala Harris, who served in the Senate throughout Mr Trump’s tenure in the White House and is a former attorney general for California, has chosen to mostly focus not on Mr Trump but on Florida Gov Ron DeSantis, lambasting the governor for the state’s Black history curriculum.

Mr Biden’s approach differs wildly from Mr Trump’s, who has regularly commented on the investigations into Mr Biden’s son Hunter.

Democratic strategists say that Mr Biden’s silence is the proper move – at least for the moment.

“There is no need for President Biden to add fuel to the fire here,” Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, told The Independent. “The indictments are getting wall-to-wall coverage without his help. Talking about these indictments would play right into Trump’s hands and allow him and his allies to say more credibly that it’s a political witch-hunt.”

Mr Biden also has to remain silent for a number of political and legal reasons. During the 2020 campaign, Mr Biden pledged that “The Justice Department in my administration will be totally independent of me” since Mr Trump had co-opted his then-attorney general William Barr in an effort to target his political rivals.

Indeed, Attorney General Merrick Garland nominated Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose office’s investigation led to two of Mr Trump’s indictments, as a means of maintaining independence because Mr Biden and Mr Trump would both be candidates for president.

Hari Sevugan, a former national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, told The Independent that Mr Biden has to stay out of the fray so as to not interfere with the prosecutions against Mr Trump.

“The president has to stay out of it from a political perspective because it is politicizing these indictments and prosecutions that will actually weaken the case against Trump,” he said.

Mr Trump in fact has argued that Mr Biden has unfairly prosecuted him, crowing that he is a victim. During a rally in New Hampshire, Mr Trump complained that the legal cases would interrupt his ability to campaign.

“So what they're doing, I'm sorry, I won't be able to go to Iowa today. I won't be able to go to New Hampshire today because I'm sitting in a courtroom on bulls*** because his attorney general charged me,” he said earlier this month.

Indeed, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office has proposed a court date of 4 March 2024, which would be the day before Super Tuesday, when 14 states and America Samoa would hold their presidential primary elections. In the same respect, the trial for Mr Trump’s case regarding his handling of classifed documents will begin on 20 May 2024, when the Republican primary will likely already be decided. The increasingly complex schedule of criminal trials could seriously impede Mr Trump’s ability to be out on the campaign trail.

Mr Trump’s legal team has proposed a court date of April 2026 for his federal trial in which he faces charges of trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election results. The protracted legal calendar could lead Mr Biden to face questions both from the press and during general election debates about Mr Trump’s cases or new revelations in the trials.

But Mr Sevugan said Mr Biden focusing on the economy and his job will help him politically and plenty of other Democrats are willing to criticise Mr Trump.

“The person who is doing the most effective job of driving the indictment news is Donald Trump,” he said.

At the same time, some Democratic strategists say that Mr Biden will need to address Mr Trump’s indictments and investigations during the campaign. Mr Trump’s criminal cases are inextricably linked to the 2024 campaign.

“It would be like not talking about the sky being blue,” longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told Politico.

At the same time, plenty of Republicans have accused the Biden administration of “weaponising” the federal government against his most likely political opponent, despite the fact that Mr Biden has no control over charging decisions.

“Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponised government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on the evening of Mr Trump’s indictment in Fulton County. “Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans see through this desperate sham.”

Republicans have regularly complained that the Biden administration is unfairly targeting Mr Trump and Republicans. Earlier this year, they launched a subcommittee on the weaponisation of the federal government partially in response to the investigations into Mr Trump.

This came after Mr Trump’s first impeachment, which came after the former president asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Mr Biden’s son Hunter in exchange for military aid.

In the near future, Mr Biden appears unwilling to discuss Mr Trump’s legal woes. Instead, his focus will turn to Hawaii, where he will travel next week to survey the devastating damage from wildfires that have already claimed more than a hundred lives, with as many as 1,000 people still mnissing.