↓
 
Home » Oh, you don’t say!: Biden had classified documents in his office

Oh, you don’t say!: Biden had classified documents in his office

The New Neo Posted on by

I think we’re on safe ground in expecting no charges to come from this:

Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review documents marked classified that were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News. The roughly 10 documents are from President Biden’s vice-presidential office at the center, the sources said. CBS News has learned the FBI is also involved in the U.S. attorney’s inquiry.

The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys “were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.,” Sauber said in a statement to CBS News. The documents were contained in a folder that was in a box with other unclassified papers, the sources said. The sources revealed neither what the documents contain nor their level of classification. A source familiar with the matter told CBS News the documents did not contain nuclear secrets.

Neither did Trump’s, but that didn’t stop the MSM from publishing rumors and innuendos that the did contain nuclear secrets.

More:

Garland assigned U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to find out how the material marked classified ended up at the Penn Biden Center. The review is considered a preliminary step, and the attorney general will determine whether further investigation is necessary, including potentially appointing a special counsel.

I predict we’ll hear very little more about this from them, except some sort of exoneration.

Here’s what McCarthy said:

GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called the recovery of documents with classified markings from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president “very concerning.” He added, “He’s had these classified [documents], and what has he said about the other president with classified documents?” Asked if this instance is different because attorneys found them and “immediately” handed the material over, McCarthy replied, “Oh, really? They just now found them after all those years.”

McCarthy has been strong when speaking on a highly related topic, long before his recent showdown with the Freedom Caucus. Back in August of 2022 McCarthy was in the news objecting mightily to the MAL raid on Trump:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Monday the House would investigate the Department of Justice if Republicans took the majority.

Why it matters: McCarthy’s pledge was the crescendo to widespread Republican condemnations of the DOJ after the FBI raided former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

It comes as Republicans are preparing a litany of probes into everything from Hunter Biden to the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

What they’re saying: “I’ve seen enough,” McCarthy said in a statement, asserting the DOJ “has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”

McCarthy said if Republicans retook the House, “we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”

“Attorney General [Merrick] Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” he concluded, signaling plans to subpoena Garland.

The next few months should indicate whether any of this will happen, and then whether it will make any difference. For examle:

“The political usefulness of this for the Republicans, as people attack Donald Trump about his issues. I get it and they’re not the same. And yes, there will be conflation here. But the political usefulness of this cannot be underscored, cannot be overstated enough,” Jennings said with glee.

Jennings continued: “to give Republicans this talking point for the rest of their natural lives almost exonerates Trump in terms of debates and what comes up. I mean, if this ever comes up and somebody brings it up, you’re always gonna have this retort.”

“Everybody in politics is laughing their rear end off tonight that this happened to Joe Biden given how strident his commentary was in attacking Donald Trump about this in the first place. So, yeah, it’s a big deal politically,” Jennings added.

Maybe.

Comments

Oh, you don’t say!: Biden had classified documents in his office — 36 Comments

  1. Just another “Republicans Pounce” moment!!
    Sigh….

    File under: “Hey, listen up you jerks. We’re REALLY busy wrecking the country. Don’t even THINK of getting in our way!”

  3. It’s interesting what the media does and does not allow to spread. Hunter’s laptop: none of them touch it. Twitter coordinating with the FBI, they won’t touch that either.

    So when Biden’s classified documents are on by-God CNN, you have to wonder why they allow it to spread.

    There was a time, even as recently as 10 years ago, when I’d read the news to know what was going on. Now I read the news with the assumption that someone is trying to get me to believe something is going on and I try to get some clues as to what it is, who wants it and how they benefit.

    Never would I have guessed, growing up, that I would one day have to read the New York Times the way Russians used to read Pravda.

  4. “this instance is different because attorneys found them and “immediately” handed the material over”

    No. This instance is different because when Biden came into possession of the classified documents, he had no authority to set their classification nor remove them. Trump’s claim is he declassified his documents as President, which he has authority to do for any document, and bureaucrats at the National Archive claim Presidents don’t have that authority.

  5. Frederick, my guess is that CNN felt it had to mention it, and to try to mitigate it, because the initial report was on CBS News, not Fox.

  7. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is getting legacy media attention because some people are genuinely angry with all the complete BS leaks they were fed over the Trump documents. There are still some journalists with enough self-respect to get upset when THEY are lied to.

    Mike

  8. SHIREHOME:

    Biden’s not going anywhere unless they have a rreplacement they prefer, or unless removing him is 100% unavoidable.

  9. Off topic:

    A few posts back re 2023 predictions:

    I said the Mets would sign Carlos Correa.

    He just signed with the Twins.

  10. I don’t see this hurting Biden. However, unless we hear of an FBI raid on Biden’s facility where these documents were found; then I think this revelation will make things difficult for Garland and Wray to justify the raid on Mar-a-lago. It already seemed unjust and political, and this new revelation provides proof of that politicization.

  12. So, former Chief Archivist, David Fierriero, saw the boxes leaving and said, “So what, no problem.” Just the opposite of what he did with Trump.

    Obama can store classified documents in a warehouse. Biden, who as Vice-President, should not have had classified documents, has them. But Trump is a national, constitutional crisis.

    Democrats can go into the Archives, stuff papers down their pants and destroy them with the consequence of losing their security clearance for a few years.

    Trump has pictures splattered across the news of folder headings saying “Classified,” while nothing has appeared on the national media that I have seen of the Biden Files.

  13. Maybe his attorneys will make him take a cognitive test to get him off the hook.

    Biden has been incompetent his whole life, but he was useful to people like Obama. Some of his brain connections don’t work. I doubt that he even knows what classified is. How could anyone share classified info with him?

  14. I was running errands this afternoon and had the local NPR station on. What a tale they weaved, full of soothing, succulent details that expertly defused any doubts whatsoever that the Biden Top Secret document stash bore any possible resemblance to the disastrous, calamitous, national crisis that we were plunged into by the Trump documents, stolen at the hand of the dreaded Orange Demon himself (none of which were Top Secret, but never mind that)

    In fact, it’s almost a sin to discuss these two topics at the same time, to even imply any association by the similarity of circumstance! Why it’s like talking about baby ducklings and atomic fission! One tick after another, the ‘expert’ patiently explained it for the listeners: Not just night & day, but night & day in different galaxies, and a billion years apart at least! I finally had to turn it off – the hyperbole fumes were causing my ‘Check Engine’ light to come on.

  15. I just read somewhere that the documents were about Ukraine, Iran, and the UK. Joe might have been really interested in the ones about Ukraine and the Iran Nuclear Deal..

  16. MSM, legacy media, the media, … we need to find a better way to refer to these despicable vermin. Unfortunately I do not have one. I tend to call them left-wing media but that is all of them. Rush called them drive-bys but that makes them seem too innocuous. Glenn Reynolds refers to them as Democrat operatives with bylines.

  17. …”The documents were discovered on Nov. 2, 2022 — six days before the midterm elections — and their existence was only made public Monday.

    The revelation of the documents comes as the Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Federal investigators recovered dozens of classified files during an FBI search of the former president’s residence. “

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-09/doj-reviewing-classified-files-discovered-at-former-biden-office?sref=yYYRek8e

    Overheard on Twitter: “So the classified documents Biden had hidden in a closet were found prior to midterms, but absolutely no one in the press reported it?

    However, some mysterious, yet-unnamed person leaked the ‘#DobbsDecision’ just in time for midterms?

    I hate these people.”

  18. @ Bob Wilson > “Glenn Reynolds refers to them as Democrat operatives with bylines.”

    I sometimes refer to the group as DeMedia.

  19. @ Kate > “Frederick, my guess is that CNN felt it had to mention it, and to try to mitigate it, because the initial report was on CBS News, not Fox.”

    But why did CBS break a story so potentially damaging to Biden?
    It’s not enough, to most voters, to be a cause to dump Biden in 2024, even if there is a Democrat faction working for that agenda.

    Perhaps “they” (CBS-CNN-DeMedia in general, following the memo from their handlers at Biden Inc.) are preparing Democrat voters for a grudging admission that Trump didn’t really do anything wrong (based, finally, on analyzing the documents he actually had and considering the President’s classification authority), like so many other admissions the are making about their wild accusations over the last 6 years that have been busted and reluctantly owned.

    https://notthebee.com/article/washington-post-finally-comes-to-terms-with-the-fact-that-russian-trolls-didnt-actually-influence-the-2016-election

    See, (they will say) it was perfectly okay for Biden to accidentally take those docs, and we are so even-handed and unbiased we’re not gonna dump on Trump anymore, even though he did something much worse (which we can’t actually prove but trust us on this one).

  20. From Just the News — follow the money if you can’t see the dots.

    https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/bidens-classified-docs-drama-has-bigger-implications-shadow-chinese

    Recent revelations surrounding classified documents found in Joe Biden’s private think tank office have not only turned the Mar-a-Lago raid investigation on its head, it also has revived scrutiny of the many ties China has to America’s first family and its effort to use academia to spy in America.

    The classified memos from the Obama administration, disclosed on Monday, were actually found last November inside the offices Biden used at the Penn-Biden Center, a think tank setup by the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

    Long before the documents were found, the Penn-Biden Center was the focus of a watchdog complaint because its parent university had received large sums of money — estimated to be at least $54 million — in the time period around when Biden joined the group. This raised the specter of Chinese donors having helped fund the nearly $1 million in personal pay Biden received from the think tank.

    The center, which was announced in 2017 and opened one year later, was set up the same year that Biden’s son Hunter was creating a joint venture with Chinese officials in a company called CEFC to pursue natural gas deals within the United States which would have benefitted the communist nation.

    Hunter Biden even offered his father a set of keys to the office for the new venture in 2017, the emails showed.
    …
    The web of Chinese deals and contacts — one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese associates Patrick Ho was eventually arrested and convicted — has many in the GOP now believing China’s monetary contributions to Penn were no accident. It may even be possible that China could have accessed sensitive information from the Bidens as a result.
    …
    “Any amount of money from China should be examined closely by all branches of the USG,” former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told JustTheNews.

    “The fact that this is in the tens of millions makes it even more alarming,” said Nunes. “I find it hard to believe the DOJ and FBI wouldn’t know about this amount of money and who’s connected to it. Follow the money!”

    This controversy comes at an inconvenient time for Democrats, as the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to establish a subcommittee to investigate U.S.-China strategic competition. The final tally was 365-65. New Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was credited with spearheading the effort to massage the wording of the proposal so it would be broad enough to garner broad bipartisan support.
    …
    Biden claims he had no knowledge of how the documents ended up in his office.

    Biden’s claims about anything, including “and” and “the,” have no credibility with anyone keeping up.

    https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2023/01/10/brutal-thread-of-21-blatant-lies-biden-has-told-some-more-than-once-an-enlightening-must-read/

  22. The scandals keep coming.
    Together with the “no-big-deal” classified docs discovered in “Biden”‘s liquor cabinet, there are rumors, as yet unconfirmed, that Top-Secret-For-Your-Iris-Only files have also been unearthed, suggesting the REAL reason for the “Biden” administration’s hasty “departure” from Afghanistan (AKA “the Afghan Debacle”); viz., in return for which, the Taliban, under tremendous pressure from the WH, are reputed to have acquiesced to grant Hunter Biden first dibs on their back-to-the-future automobile, code-named PBH-622.
    You really can’t make this stuff up….
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11622519/The-Taliban-unveils-SUPERCAR-powered-Toyota-Corolla-engine.html

  23. I took some heat around here for saying that I needed to know more about what was acceptable for other administrations before passing judgement on the MAL raid.

    Well, this is a data point making the MAL raid look more like persecution than normal law enforcement.

    I remain astounded by the degree to which the left loses their ever-loving minds over Trump. These people just cannot help themselves.

  24. “I remain astounded by the degree to which the left loses their ever-loving minds over Trump. These people just cannot help themselves.”

    And here I thought you didn’t have much of a sense of humor.
    I really must apologize….

  25. This may come as a shock, Barry Meislin, but it is possible to recognize leftist idiocy directed towards Trump as well as Trump’s own destructive tendencies.

  26. I believe Brandon’s pals in Commie China have also been hanging around Penn.

  27. Bauxite on January 11, 2023 at 7:45 am said:
    I took some heat around here for saying that I needed to know more about what was acceptable for other administrations before passing judgement on the MAL raid.

    It is easy enough to understand from the beginning, if you understand that POTUS has total power to classify and declass documents. Since the documents date from Trump’s time in office, there is no way to prove they are classified. He had full power to declass them however he wished.

    I also have heard from someone I trust and is a real SME that this power extends to the VP as well. If that is correct (and it likely is), Biden had full power to handle his documents as he wished.

    But the Mar a Lago raid was clearly just a political action to get Trump. The way info was released and covered in the media, as well as the search warrant, all show that.

  28. The revelation of the documents comes as the Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Federal investigators recovered dozens of classified files during an FBI search of the former president’s residence. “

    Note the tell in the above; the documents were not classified (markings notwithstanding). There is no way to prove they were. POTUS has unlimited declass power which is derived from his constitutional power (and can’t be limited by EOs or acts of Congress, only by constitutional amendment).

    The only exception is if the documents date from after Trump left office, but if that is true, we would know about it. They would have acted on it and filed charges.

  29. Don, of course I am not an SME, but the Vice President is not in charge of the government unless there is a situation covered by the 25th Amendment. So I doubt the VP has ordinary authority to declare documents “classified.” If the President delegates responsibility for some matter to the VP, the VP would operate under the security arrangements appropriate to that subject matter. Or so it seems to me.

  31. Kate,

    That is how it seemed to me. My first assumption was that the VP would have class/declass power over items created by his office, essentially delegated by POTUS.

    I only state otherwise because based on a source I trust. Doesn’t mean he’s correct. But I don’t bet against him on these sorts of questions.

  32. In following up, it seems that W Bush and Obama had EOs that granted the VP original classification authority. However from what I can tell, the VP wasn’t explicitly given declass authority over anything he didn’t classify.

    Given the nature of what Biden had, it is likely documents that didn’t originate in his office, wasn’t classified under his authority. And likely then a crime.

  33. Listen, if a president of a country sold the farm to China, that president wouldn’t want anyone to know about it either….
    What’s so difficult to understand here?

    (It’s just a sequel (to a sequel to a sequel, etc.) to the “Hunter Biden” saga—AKA, “Game of Groans”(?)—with an unusual twist in the plot line.)

    Meanwhile, tell me yer pronouns (or even better, OD on fentanyl—or no! I’ve go it: let’s scratch our heads about the FAA “fiasco”! Sorry, make that, DISTRACTION….)

    File under: Keep yer eyes on the ball!… (But what happens if it’s the guvmint’s ball…and IT decides to take it and go home…?)

  34. @ Barry > “if a president of a country sold the farm to China, that president wouldn’t want anyone to know about it either”

    Then why not destroy the papers instead of keeping them?
    And especially keeping them in a not-too-secret place.
    Or did some functionary ordered to “pack up the office” when Biden left the VP slot just dump things in a box without looking to see what they were?
    (as I suspect happened with a lot of the docs Trump had)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

↑