One week before the November 8, 2022, midterm elections, approximately ten classified documents were found in a closet of the private office used by Joe Biden in 2017-18, located at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Yesterday the special counsel to the President, Richard Sauber, released a statement declaring that the documents from the time when Biden was Vice-President, were discovered on Nov. 2, 2022, and turned over to the National Archives the next day. At some point in the last two months, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, John Lausch, to review the classified documents.
VP Biden had left his public office in January 2017, and was known to occupy the Penn Biden office later in 2017. The classified documents were out of the hands of the National Archives for almost five years. While it worked to Democrats’ advantage not to have such an embarrassing story appear in the week before the election, with the House having been taken over by the Republicans, the matter was unlikely to be kept a secret any longer. President Biden, who lambasted former President Donald Trump for being “totally irresponsible” in having classified material at his Mar-a-Lago office, has not yet commented on his own record-keeping.
Trump took a jab at Biden over the revelation, posting on his Truth Social platform: “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified.”
The incoming Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican James Comer, posed the question: “What’s the difference in what President Trump did versus what we now know President Biden did?”
CBS News, which broke the story yesterday, explained that the Biden case was not the same as Trump’s situation, as the mishandling of classified materials does not have to lead to a criminal prosecution. As evidence, they cited the case of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who kept secret documents on her private email server even after leaving office.
It’s hard to make this stuff up.
