This has been a terrible week for President Joe Biden, beginning with the "discovery" of a number of highly classified documents from his years as vice president in an unsecured office at the University of Pennsylvania “think tank” in Biden’s name.
While this surprised a lot of Biden supporters, his detractors were just amazed that there was a "think tank" in Biden’s name. But it soon got worse.
Then we learned that the National Archives and Records Administration officials knew of this cache of classified material six days before the midterm elections, but waited until now to confirm their existence. The delay strongly suggesting a political motive.
"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," House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., observed.
"Meanwhile, NARA instigated a public and unprecedented FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago —former President Trump’s home — to retrieve presidential records."
Add to that the fact that the records in Trump’s possession were covered under the Presidential Records Act, and he had the power to declassify those records.
As vice president Biden had no such power, and there’s no "Vice Presidential Records Act" for him to fall back on.
Then we learned that the think tank itself wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be — that it had unseemly ties to foreign organizations — especially in Communist China.
"The Penn Biden Center is a dark-money, revolving-door nightmare where foreign competitors like China donated millions of dollars to the university so that they could have access to future high-ranking officials," said Tom Anderson, director of the Government Integrity Project at the Virginia-based National Legal and Policy Center.
But things really got strange yesterday, when CNN White House reporter Kevin Liptak revealed that yet more classified documents were discovered at yet two more unsecured locations.
"Biden’s aides found documents with classified markings at two places at his home in Wilmington," he reported, "a storage space and an adjacent room, according to WH counsel’s office."
It later came out that the "storage space" was the garage, and the "adjacent room" was likely a home office.
Question: Has anyone checked the beach house? Just a suggestion.
Everyone concentrated on the garage space, believing it to be an irresponsible place to keep classified material. When questioned about it yesterday Biden shot back that they were safe there because they were in a locked garage next to a Corvette.
"My Corvette's in a locked garage, okay? So it's not like they're sitting out on the street."
He added, "People know I take classified documents and classified material very seriously."
So apparently the new gold standard for storing classified material is in a garage next to a Corvette.
Famed constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz remarked on Thursday that after all the smoke clears, neither Biden nor Trump will be prosecuted for retaining classified material.
"I think in the end these allegations cancel each other out. I don't think anybody's going to be prosecuted and I don't think anybody should be prosecuted," Dershowitz said Thursday during an appearance on Newsmax TV's "Spicer & Co.”
"Nobody took things home in order to sell them to the Chinese, probably it was mostly inadvertent, laziness, carelessness, maybe in some instances a desire to have material that they could look to help them write their memoirs."
However, Lara Trump, wife of Eric Trump, brought up a non-legal issue on Newsmax TV, one that could spell problems for Democrats in 2024.
She believes that the Biden classified document revelations reek of hypocrisy, especially when placed alongside the FBI raid of her father-in-law’s home.
"It's obvious hypocrisy, and I think the American people very clearly see that," Trump said on Newsmax's "Rob Schmitt Tonight" Thursday. "This is the reason that people have very little trust in our politicians and our institutions at this point.”
And the electorate is already moving toward the GOP because of Biden’s missteps.
A Gallup poll released Thursday found that for the first time in more than 30 years, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats — 45 to 44%.
On Tuesday the research arm of the Republican National Committee (RNC) posted a lengthy thread on Twitter, describing 21 made-up stories Biden has told about himself during the nearly two years while serving as president.
But they can’t compete with an even bigger whopper he told in 2018:
"I don’t have access to classified information anymore," he told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
Biden made that disclaimer at the Penn-Biden Center — the very think tank where the first set of classified documents were discovered days before the midterms.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
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