“It’s not even clear that the documents had been in Biden’s possession”
The GOP is beside itself over news that some classified documents were found in November among papers stored at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. by Biden’s own attorneys. Isn’t this just what prompted the FBI to investigate Donald Trump, they demand? Where’s the outrage? Where are the jackbooted thugs? Where’s Attorney General Merrick Garland’s investigation?
Twitter quipster Jeff Tiedrich put the affair in context, tweeting, “weird how Joe Biden found classified documents and voluntarily returned them without claiming he magically declassified them, or saying the FBI planted them, or lying about having already returned them, or needing to have his shitty golf motel searched. what game is Biden playing”?
Indeed, reports indicate the White House notified authorities immediately and the National Archives retrieved the Penn documents the next day.
Clearly, the papers surfacing is unwelcome news for the Biden administration. As is news that a search turned up a second batch this week. It is also a complicating factor for special counsel Jack Smith who is already investigating the Trump/Mar-a-Lago hoard. But so far the new documents appear more of a political than a legal stumblingblock for Smith. Trump claimed his purloined documents as his own and fought the government’s efforts to reclaim them. Smith is investigating Trump and his lawyers for obstruction.
“This is under review by the Department of Justice. I’m not going to go beyond what the president shared,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, declining to respond to several questions about whether additional properties — including Biden’s Delaware homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach — had been searched.
White House officials have said that they are cooperating with the Justice Department and that Biden’s lawyers quickly handed over the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration — the agency tasked with handling presidential records.
[…]
To review the discovery of Biden classified documents, Garland tapped U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr. of Chicago, a holdover from the Trump administration. Depending on what this initial investigation yields, Garland could decide to appoint a special counsel.
As MAGA Republicans rage and run cover for Trump, Marcy Wheeler notes problems with the reporting to date (she takes CBS to task here). For one, Judge “Beryl Howell might yet hold Trump or his lawyers in contempt for failing to return all the classified documents in his possession.”
“Another amusing difference is that for the entirety of the Trump Administration, Biden continued to have clearance; Biden decided not to continue intelligence briefings for Trump shortly after he launched a coup attempt,” Wheeler adds (emphasis mine):
But there’s something else missing from the coverage so far: it’s not even clear that the documents had been in Biden’s possession, as opposed to another of his former staffers at the Obama White House. As CBS noted, Tony Blinken was the Managing Director at the start, followed by Steve Richetti.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, was the center’s managing director in 2018. Steve Richetti, who now serves as a top White House aide to Mr. Biden, was managing director of the center in 2019.
While Blinken had already returned to the private sector by 2017, Richetti was Biden’s Chief of Staff when they left.
One thing Chicago US Attorney John Lausch has been investigating is how the documents ended up at Penn Biden.
Lau[s]ch’s review will examine, in part, how the documents got from Mr. Biden’s vice-presidential office to the Penn Biden Center.
In other words, it might not even be a Biden thing. It could be one of his staffers — and it could be a more serious issue if someone was found to have intentionally taken documents with them when they left the White House, or was using them in the interim. It could be Richetti who did it, for example (which would be one reason among many not to reveal the investigation publicly before discovering how the documents got where they were).
There will be insane reporting ahead — there already has been.
And virtually none of it will report that Trump is still suspected of hoarding classified documents.
Nope. Not likely.