Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) speculated that the classified documents case involving President Joe Biden was a Democratic plot to move him out of the way for 2024.
The Florida Republican offered the theory to Fox News Digital that Democrats might have publicized Biden's possession of classified materials from his two terms as vice president because they're hoping he does not run for a second term as president.
"There's an element to this that feels like the Democrats are taking out Joe Biden," Gaetz claimed. "I don't know that that's the case, but I don't know that it's not."
"But just as Joe Biden is hardening the cement around his decision to run for president again, they start looking for what classified documents might have been tucked away eight years ago."
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Attorney general Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the documents found by the president's personal attorneys at the Penn Biden Center days before the midterm election and additional documents found later at his private residence in Delaware.
"I mean, there's an element of this where it's Joe Biden's lawyer who turns this information over, it's Joe Biden's own Justice Department that's appointed a special counsel to investigate him," Gaetz said. "Maybe the Democrats have realized that Joe Biden is not useful to them anymore, and they just assume toss him out and get a younger crop of candidates engaged in the next presidential race."
Gaetz didn't offer any basis for his speculation, and he then offered additional theories about the possible contents of the documents, which reportedly include intelligence reports about Ukraine and China.
"What if the documents relate to our economy?" he said. "What if Joe Biden was hustling information to his CCP (Chinese Communist Party) funders at the Biden Center for UPenn and that gave China economic advantage over Americans? That would create a nexus between those documents and our economic woes at the hands of rising China. I don't know because I don't know what the documents pertain to, but documents in and of themselves don't seem to have an obvious connection to the quality of life of my constituents, in the absence of understanding their content and context."
