Rather than be the ten thousandth commenter on the discovery of classified documents in President Biden’s private office at the University of Pennsylvania, I’ll limit myself to looking at his first public statement about the incident. At a press conference following his meeting yesterday with the aspiring dictator of Canada and the president of those portions of Mexico not under the control of drug cartels, President Biden was asked, as part of a portmanteau query that also included questions for Messrs. Trudeau and López Obrador and one for Biden about border security, to “explain how classified documents ended up in one of your offices? And should the public get – have been notified sooner?”
In response, Mr. Biden read from a prepared statement. Here is the White House transcript:
Well, let me get rid of the easy one first. People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously.
When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me – a secure office in the Capitol, when I – the four years after being Vice President, I was a professor at Penn.
They found some documents in a box – you know, a locked cabinet, or at least a closet. And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box. And they did what they should have done: They immediately called the Archives – immediately called the Archives, turned them over to the Archives. And I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office.
But I don’t know what’s in the documents. I’ve – my lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. I’ve turned over the boxes – they’ve turned over the boxes to the Archives. And we’re cooperating fully – cooperating fully with the review, and – which I hope will be finished soon, and will be more detail at that time.
The President’s ghostwriter evidently didn’t anticipate, or didn’t care to answer, the second part of the question: Why was disclosure delayed for more than two months? The answer to the first part, to the extent that there is an answer, is confined to a single paragraph, and that paragraph is confused and uninformative. To quote again:
When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me – a secure office in the Capitol, when I – the four years after being Vice President, I was a professor at Penn.
Three events are mentioned: (1) lawyers “clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, (2) “they” (the same lawyers?) setting up “a secure office in the Capitol” for him, (3) the “four years after being Vice President” during which he “was a professor at Penn”. On the surface, the sequence is (3), (1), (2) – except that the “secure office in the Capitol” can have existed only while Biden was Vice President. The Veep has an office in the Capitol, because he is President of the Senate; the President of the United States does not. Therefore, the actual sequence is (2), (3), (1). There’s not a word about how classified documents got from the Capitol to the university. (Note, again, that the President was speaking from a prepared statement, not ad libbing. Some staffer, doubtless several decades younger than Joe Biden, wrote that garbled run-on sentence and thought that it made sense.)
Mr. Biden professes to “take classified documents and classified information seriously”. He’s not like that guy whom he condemned as “irresponsible” for having classified documents in his possession after leaving office. One presumes that serious attention to classification would have included procedures to prevent classified materials from being commingled with personal documents, so as to ensure that the former didn’t migrate from the “secure office in the Capitol” to “my office at the University of Pennsylvania” along with the latter. If the President had been prepared to answer the reporter’s question, he would have told us what procedures he had in place and would have announced that he had launched an investigation into why they failed.
I infer that he doesn’t want the question answered; he just hopes that it will go away. And it probably will, as the media and the Democratic Party (pardon the redundancy) rally behind the least implausible Presidential candidate that they have for 2024.
Addendum: Well, this happened fast, per NBC (posted at 1:11 p.m. PST):
Aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Since November, after the discovery of documents with classified markings in his former office, Biden aides have been searching for any additional classified materials that might be in other locations he used, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the ongoing inquiry.
The White House did not return a request for comment. The Justice Department had no comment.
Donald Trump is no doubt very happy, even though, as Andy McCarthy points out, we don’t know, so far, that Joe Biden was an equal scofflaw where classification rules were concerned.
Second Addendum: In a post later than the one linked above, Andy McCarthy observes, “The president doesn’t seem to have gone about this in the manner of someone who ‘take[s] classified documents and classified information seriously’.” He notes in particular that the President, ostensibly on the advice of his lawyers, has disclaimed any interest in learning anything about the documents that were in his possession for four years.
Biden is the president of the United States, the official most responsible for national security. If top-secret information may have fallen into the wrong hands – a possibility that must be indulged when classified intelligence is maintained in an unauthorized place – then it is Biden’s responsibility to know what is in the documents so that he can assess the potential damage. That’s not just his duty; he is in the unique position of knowing who had access to his private office, what the security, visiting, and maintenance arrangements were in the years that the documents were apparently maintained there, and so on.
Mr. McCarthy also presents the most charitable explanation of Biden’s conduct that is at all plausible:
Biden first did what he habitually does, which is to assert that “people know” some supposed attribute of his that, in fact, is neither an attribute of his nor believed by “people” to be one. In this instance, he said, “People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously.” We don’t know any such thing. The most sensitive thing Biden is known to have handled in his long political career is the pullout from Afghanistan, an utter catastrophe of his own making. He is a notorious plagiarist and résumé inflater whose best-known trait is to say with brimming confidence things that are not only untrue but easily demonstrated to be untrue. Everything about him screams sloppy and erratic, which is why White House aides charged with damage control hold their breath every time he speaks. There is absolutely no reason to believe he is any more careful in his handling of classified intelligence than in his handling of anything else.
Less charitable hypotheses are also plausible.
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