With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at transitiontips@politico.com. With Democrats’ hopes for a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riots fading, President JOE BIDEN has stayed notably quiet. It is not for lack of opinion about the riots or the need to investigate them, but, rather, a manifestation of the White House’s belief that the best course of action when it comes to Trump-era accountability — at least right now — is strategic distance. From conversations with Biden confidantes, two threads emerge regarding his approach and thinking around the Jan. 6 commission. The first is that he wants it. Yes, the administration has put out a statement of support for the legislation that would create such a body. But beyond that, the president fundamentally believes it’s necessary to conduct a thorough reckoning of what led to the ransacking of the Capitol and the larger threats posed to democracy. That he spent such a large portion of his address to a joint session of Congress warning of those threats was no accident—it was the very theme that he’d used at the launch of his campaign. “He does see this as a genuine hour of crisis for democracy,” said a source who has talked to Biden about these matters. “He feels it viscerally, that he’s spent fifty years devoted to the American experiment and this guy [Trump] is just gonna flush it all down the drain.” In that vein, Biden stands somewhat apart from the man he once served, President BARACK OBAMA , who resisted investigating the Bush administration for its authorization and use of torture. But Biden is similar to Obama in one important way, and that constitutes the second thread. He sees no upside in pushing aggressively for the commission’s creation. In fact, the White House thinks its involvement could backfire — hurting the perception that the commission is a sober-minded, apolitical concept and imperiling its creation. For that reason, the administration has almost entirely deferred to Congress. Two top Hill Democratic aides said they were unaware of any White House involvement at all. “They see this as a congressional thing, that it’s about a breach of the Capitol,” said one of those aides. Not everyone views the arms-length approach as a particular stroke of strategic genius. Among some Biden allies there is concern that officials in the White House have over-internalized the oft-attributed (likely inaccurately) Napoleon maxim: “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.” ALKA PRADHAN , a human rights attorney who has written about the need for Biden to unflinchingly investigate a host of Trump-era decisions and policies, argued that there is simply no intellectual space for political leaders to remain muted on the commission. Biden may not want to politicize the commission. But it’s happening without him, as DONALD TRUMP scolds Republicans who vote for it and intimidates those who may soon have to vote. “The administration has a tightrope to walk between getting their agenda passed with enough votes and showing leadership that we haven’t seen in several years,” she said. “But at the same time, the events of Jan. 6 in particular were so egregious, crossing lines of illegality that we have not seen domestically in decades or much longer than that, that they needed to come out swinging on that issue. I don’t think they should have left it solely up to congressional leaders to figure out how there was going to be accountability for this.” “I don’t think they’ve done enough,” Pradhan concluded. Whether, in fact, they are doing enough will soon become clear. The Senate is expected to vote on the House-passed bill creating the commission. And Democrats are particularly adamant that Republicans pay some price if they choose to filibuster it. “Make these fuckers vote on it,” declared the other aide. Should that filibuster happen, then Biden will face a choice. He could keep looking forward: speaking out about the need to protect democracy, making policies that affirm the independence of the judiciary, tackling reforms to strengthen voting, and so on. Or he could do whatObama resisted doing: look backward, push for a fall-back alternative to the Jan. 6 committee, and encourage lawmakers, investigators and others to investigate other Trump-era blunders, chief among them the Covid response. The White House, as has been its want throughout this entire process, is cagey about where Biden will come down on this one. But if past is prologue, he might have more appetite for accountability politics than the public thinks, and certainly more than Obama did. Back during the close of the 2008 presidential campaign, as then-candidate Obama was reinforcing his reluctance to prosecute Bush administration officials because he felt it would divide the country, one prominent member of his campaign strayed off script: Biden. “If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued,” he said, causing headaches for the Obama campaign, “not out of vengeance, not out of retribution—out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law.” PSA — We’re going to be experimenting with some new items and sections. Tell us what you like and what you hate. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you REBECCA BROCATO? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: transitiontips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. 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