Crisis communications, at its core, is pretty simple: Discern where the story is going. Fully disclose the facts. Admit where mistakes were made. And do it all as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

So it’s been a little confounding to watch Joe Biden’s White House deal with the discovery of classified documents from his years as vice president and in the Senate casually stored in a variety of locations, including his garage in Wilmington, Delaware, beside his prized 1967 Corvette.

The impact of the first discovery, on November 2, must have been immediately apparent to Biden’s team, given the public uproar and legal thicket Donald Trump created by absconding with hundreds of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, only to dump them at his Mar-a-Lago resort. President Biden criticized Trump for that in the fall, asking, “How could anyone be that irresponsible?”

Biden rightly noted that documents are marked classified and top secret for a reason: to protect intelligence-gathering “sources and methods” and those who risk their lives to provide crucial national-security secrets. There are protocols for handling such documents, and unsecured storerooms—or unguarded garages—are not among them. Nor are former presidents and vice presidents entitled to take classified documents as mementos when they leave office.

[Read: Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy]

Why, then, did it take months after the first discovery for the White House to acknowledge that Biden, too, had classified documents in his possession—and why did that acknowledgment come only after a leak to CBS News about an ongoing federal investigation into the matter? And why did the White House’s first disclosure omit that there had been a second discovery of documents, on December 20 at Biden’s home in Delaware? (There have been sporadic additional discoveries announced since, adding to a sense of furtiveness and lack of transparency on Biden’s part.)

Last week, Biden compounded his problems by declaring that when the special counsel investigation Attorney General Merrick Garland launched into the president’s handling of documents is complete, the country will discover that “there’s no there there.” What he likely meant was that this will be found to have been an innocent mistake, probably made by staff as they hastily packed up his office and official residence when he left the vice presidency in 2017. (This is the same case former Vice President Mike Pence is making about classified documents newly discovered in his Indiana home.)

In Biden’s defense, his lawyers, upon discovery of the first set of documents, contacted the National Archives and surrendered the materials. The president’s legal team has been cooperating with the Justice Department in its probe. Trump, by contrast, removed hundreds of documents. The National Archives and then the FBI spent more than a year trying to recover the materials. Trump’s lawyer asserted that all the documents had been returned when many had not. And the former president claimed that, having declassified them through some mystical process for which there is no record, he was perfectly free to keep them.

Still, Biden’s “no there there” comment landed clumsily, as there were documents there, in his old private office and at his home. At best, it was sloppy and improper. There is some there there. Biden and the White House seemingly have violated every precept—speed, transparency, contrition—of crisis communications.

But here is where I cut the flacks some slack. From the moment the first documents were discovered and turned over to the government, Biden’s lawyers seized control. Their primary mission has been to protect their client from legal, not political, jeopardy. And their objective has been to work with the probe, and be transparent with the prosecutors, who, as a matter of investigative protocol, never want public disclosure until their inquiries have concluded. I presume that is why Biden’s team didn’t acknowledge when the CBS story broke that there had been a second recovery of documents.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

They quickly learned, however, that although prosecutors disdain disclosures from the subjects of their probes, leaks can still happen. This week, after the FBI searched the president’s Delaware home, with his permission, unnamed sources told CNN that federal investigators had been prepared to issue a warrant if the president had refused, though such a threat proved unnecessary. It was a gratuitous leak, perhaps meant to blunt Republican criticism about political bias against the DOJ and FBI, who were granted a subpoena to search Mar-a-Lago last summer after repeated attempts failed to recover the documents from Trump.

Biden’s team appears to be betting that full cooperation, and less public conversation, will lead to a relatively benign conclusion from Special Counsel Robert Hur, and that all this will wind up as an embarrassing and transient flap, rather than an enduring scandal. The revelation about Pence adds to the “everyone does it” assumption so easily sold in our nuance-resistant politics, perhaps to Biden’s benefit and certainly to Trump’s.

For now, the Biden docudrama is like a ball of yarn for House Republicans intent on tearing into the president, which risks hurting his standing among the broader public. It also could make it harder for the DOJ to pursue a case against Trump. But the president and his team might be willing to endure weeks or months more of shouted questions they cannot or will not answer if that means the special counsel ultimately absolves him of any serious wrongdoing.

• FBI search of Biden's Delaware home resulted from high-stakes discussions between the DOJ and Biden attorneys • Opinion: We're seeing the first major blow to Biden's 'regular Joe' image

• Trump and Biden teams see Pence disclosure as a classified documents defense • Opinion: Pence delivered Biden a lifeline but it's not without limits • Analysis: Trump seeks to exploit Pence's discomfort

A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence's Indiana home last week, and he has turned those classified records over to the FBI, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

• CNN Poll: Broad majority of Americans approve of appointment of special counsel to investigate Biden documents • Clinton, Bush and Obama turned over all classified records, representatives say • Analysis: How Pence's classified documents storm could be good news for Biden and Trump

Former Trump White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin speaks with CNN's Anderson Cooper about the discovery of about a dozen documents marked classified in former Vice President Mike Pence's Indiana home last week.

About a week after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents, former Vice President Mike Pence asked an attorney to review four boxes of documents stored in his Indiana home, according to an attorney for Pence.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The American economy is doing fine. So why are tech companies laying off tens of thousands of workers?

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option. Are standardized tests racist, or are they anti-racist? A recession is not inevitable.

Copycats

Last Friday, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, laid off 12,000 of its employees—about 6 percent of its total workforce. Yesterday, Spotify announced layoffs for a similar percentage of its staff.

By now, you might be used to the steady drip of news about tech companies slashing jobs. About 130,000 people have been laid off from large tech and media companies in the past 12 months, according to one estimate. The reasons for this are not obvious. America’s overall unemployment rate is 3.5 percent, which ties for the lowest mark of the 21st century. And tech has long been one of the country’s most dynamic industries. So why is it struggling during an otherwise optimistic moment for America’s economy?

Our staff writers Annie Lowrey and Derek Thompson, who both recently published articles on the tech layoffs, offer several explanations for the trend. The first and most obvious is the Federal Reserve’s effort to ease inflation by raising interest rates sharply over the past year. As Annie writes:

Pretty much all American businesses across all business sectors are reliant on borrowed cash in one way or another … But many tech companies were especially conditioned to very low interest rates: Uber, an enormous and long-established business, for instance, loses money on many rides, and thousands and thousands of start-ups accrue huge losses and rely on their financiers to foot their bills while they grow.

But when inflation and then interest rates increased, these companies—which were making long-term promises at the expense of short-term profits—“got clobbered,” as Derek puts it.

The second reason: the pandemic. Annie reminds us what the economy looked like when Americans were in the thick of isolation:

People stopped going to theaters and started watching more movies and shows at home—hurting AMC and aiding Netflix and Hulu. Families stopped shopping as much in person and began buying more things online—depressing town centers and boosting Amazon and Uber Eats, and spurring many businesses to pour money into digital advertising. Companies quit hosting corporate retreats and started facilitating meetings online—depriving hotel chains of money and bolstering Zoom and Microsoft.

Here’s Derek on how that played out:

Many people predicted that the digitization of the pandemic economy in 2020, such as the rise in streaming entertainment and online food-delivery apps and at-home fitness, were “accelerations,” pushing us all into a future that was coming anyway. In this interpretation, the pandemic was a time machine, hastening the 2030s and raising tech valuations accordingly. Hiring boomed across tech, as companies added tens of thousands of workers to meet this expectation of acceleration.

But perhaps the pandemic wasn’t really an accelerant. Maybe it was a bubble.

Consumer spending has normalized, and Americans have returned to paying for restaurants and hotels and flights. As a result, tech companies are seeing declining revenues in parts of their businesses, and some corporate officers have admitted that they grew too quickly. (Apple is an exception that might prove the rule: The company expanded more slowly than some of its counterparts and has thus far avoided layoffs.)

But even though tech companies are facing a hard dose of reality, many of them are still very profitable. And, as Annie notes, the future is brightening: “The Fed is likely to stop hiking interest rates soon. Artificial intelligence has started making amazing breakthroughs … Maybe a tech summer is just around the corner.”

Reporting in November on the tech industry’s apparent collapse, Derek used an entertaining and useful metaphor: The industry is having a midlife crisis. And that means once the crisis is over, a new era will begin. “One mistake that a journalist can make in observing these trends is to assume that, because the software-based tech industry seems to be struggling now, things will stay like this forever,” he writes. “More likely, we are in an intermission between technological epochs.”

Some argue that, as they wait out this intermission, CEOs are copying one another—laying off workers not simply as an unavoidable consequence of the changing economy, but because everybody else is doing it. “Chief executives are normal people who navigate uncertainty by copying behavior,” Derek writes. He cites the business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who told Stanford News: “Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely … Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not … These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.”

Pfeffer believes that this “social contagion” could spread to other industries. “Layoffs are contagious across industries and within industries,” he said in the Stanford News article. If so, the story of tech layoffs could end up being a much broader story about work in America.

Related:

Why everything in tech seems to be collapsing all at once The economy is improving in three major ways.

Today’s News

A gunman killed seven people and injured one other in a mass shooting at two locations in Half Moon Bay, California, just two days after the mass shooting at a Monterey Park dance hall. A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence found classified documents during a search of Pence’s Indiana home. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the ticketing market, in which Ticketmaster’s parent company testified about the issues with Taylor Swift’s concert-ticket sales.

Evening Read

The Atlantic

Twitter Has No Answers for #DiedSuddenly

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Lisa Marie Presley died unexpectedly earlier this month, and within hours, lacking any evidence, Twitter users were suggesting that her death had been caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Twitter account @DiedSuddenly_, which has about 250,000 followers, also started tweeting about it immediately, using the hashtag #DiedSuddenly. Over the past several months, news stories about any kind of sudden death or grave injury—including the death of the sports journalist Grant Wahl and the sudden collapse of the Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin—have been met with a similar reaction from anti-vaccine activists. Though most of the incidents had obvious explanations and almost certainly no connection to the vaccine, which has an extremely remote risk of causing heart inflammation—much smaller than the risk from COVID-19 itself—the idea that the shots are causing mass death has been boosted by right-wing media figures and a handful of well-known professional athletes.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The fight over California’s ancient water Photos: 2023 Lunar New Year celebrations Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis in 'Everything Everywhere All at Once" (A24)

Read. Patience, a poem by Edith Wharton (whose birthday is today), published in The Atlantic in 1880.

“Patience and I have traveled hand in hand / So many days that I have grown to trace / The lines of sad, sweet beauty in her face, / And all its veilèd depths to understand.”

Watch. Oscar nominations are out. Here are the contenders you need to see.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Layoffs are not an abstraction for the people who have lost their jobs. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with a piece of advice I read in New York magazine’s Dinner Party newsletter: Phoebe Gavin, who was laid off last week from her job as the executive director of talent and development for Vox, wrote on Twitter that though you might be tempted to reach out to a laid-off loved one or acquaintance as soon as it happens, that person will really need to hear from you two weeks later, when they’ve had time to process and are starting to figure out what’s next. So mark your calendar to check back in.

— Isabel

A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence's Indiana home last week, and he has turned those classified records over to the FBI, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Pence's attorneys have written to the US National Archives to make them aware of the findings.