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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in 2023. I'm very pleased to be joined today by

Charles Lipson, who is a much-loved spectator contributor and a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

And we are going to be talking about Joe Biden's ongoing docudrama.

Charles, I say ongoing, but I think in the last few days, it's probably fair to say the story has petered out a little bit.

The FBI conducted

another search of Joe Biden's home, his beach house in Delaware, in search of more classified

documents and didn't turn up any classified documents. And I imagine that people in Biden's

circle are hoping that this story will go away. But I think you're going

to say that it won't go away and for very good reason. Am I right in saying that you will say that?

And if so, why will this story not go away? I think it will go away as a media story because

these things have a kind of half-life of a few days unless there's new fuel for the fire.

But I don't think it'll go away as a legal issue because there are special counsels that are looking into it.

The problem with a special counsel is that unlike the rest of the Department

of Justice, they really have a single mission and they kind of fail in their mission if they don't

come back with something to indict or whatever. The problem, problem or constraint or whatever you want to call it, is that it is a

longstanding rule of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be indicted for any

crime. He can be sued in civil court. Unfortunately, I think that ought to be postponed, actually, until he's out

of office or she's out of office. But they can't be indicted because otherwise you would have,

it would override, in effect, anything that the political branch could do, that this is something that is really

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