If you imagined that the Aug. 8 FBI/DOJ raid on Donald Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago was truly over secret documents as part of an undisclosed “criminal investigation,” let’s see if a belated report of multiple illegal stashes of Joe Biden’s classified materials dating to his time as vice president between 2013-2016 receives comparable legal culpability zeal.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur, a former federal U.S. attorney from Maryland, as special counsel to investigate the matter and oversee the review of documents found thus far at three different locations:
The DOJ has known about many of those documents, some reportedly marked “top secret,” but kept that information under wraps since the first batch was discovered on Nov. 2, 2022 — six days before the midterm elections.
One or more of those first 10 documents addressed Ukraine at a time when Joe headed diplomatic relations with that country under the Obama administration and his son Hunter served as a no-show board member for Burisma, a corrupt energy company there where V.P. Biden demanded investigating the prosecutor be fired or he would have a billion dollars of U.S. money withheld.
That three-year period also covered other notable events, including the Maidan Revolution that overthrew then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Russia’s subsequent invasion and annexation of Crimea in February of 2014.
The first reported batch of classified documents turned up in the closet of Joe’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania located fewer than two miles from the White House.
The New York Post describes the Penn Biden Center as a “Biden administration patronage mill” and “dark money nightmare” which reportedly received $15.8 million in anonymous Chinese gifts in 2017 and another $14.5 million donation in May 2018, three months after the center formally opened.
The University has reportedly paid Joe more than $900,000 for a non-teaching professor position since he first departed the White House.
A Biden Center/ China connection adds murky optics given that this first tranche of documents also covers the time when Hunter had accompanied his vice president dad on a 2013 trip to Beijing Aboard Air Force Two … returning 10 days later with a $1.5 billion deal his company inked with the Communist state-owned Bank of China.
Also reported in the Post, the Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China's spy agency.
Other previously undiscovered or unreported classified documents were found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence garage alongside his Corvette and in home storage areas.
When asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, “Classified materials next to your Corvette? What were you thinking?” Biden lamely responded, “My Corvette is in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.”
“So, it was in a locked garage?” Doocy followed up.
“Yes, as well as my Corvette,” Biden admitted.
This cavalier attitude was very different from Joe Biden’s response to CBS News’ Scott Pelly Sept. 18 “60 Minutes” query regarding what he thought about the discovery of Donald Trump’s classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Biden told Pelly, “I thought, What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods? ... And it just– totally irresponsible.”
Referring to that statement, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky, the new House Oversight Committee chair, said, “We expect the same treatment for President Biden, who has apparently inappropriately maintained classified documents in an insecure setting for several years.”
Comer has demanded that the White House and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provide documents and information related to their handling of the Biden records — including the classified documents themselves.
Rep. Comer sent a letter to White House Counsel Stuart Delery stating that “The Committee is concerned that President Biden has compromised sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents.” He also demanded a list of all the people who had access to Biden’s personal office at the think tank and all documents and communications between the White House and the DOJ or NARA regarding the classified document find.
“NARA learned about these documents days before the 2022 midterm elections and did not alert the public that President Biden was potentially violating the law,” Comer wrote.
There is a big legal difference between former President Trump’s private possession of classified documents which he had full authority to declassify, versus Joe Biden’s removal of such materials as vice president with no such license.
And whereas Trump’s documents were held in a secure area previously checked by FBI agents, Biden’s garage is quite a different matter as well.
“Is the White House going to be raided tonight? Are they going to raid the Bidens?” Comer asked, clearly suggesting there is a two-tier justice system favoring Democrats and the current president over Trump and the Republicans.
Don’t count on an armed raid on Jill Biden’s wardrobe closet as happened to former first lady Melania Trump any time soon.
Perhaps instead recall the pass former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received after destroying 30,000 congressionally subpoenaed documents on her unsecure server.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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