The drip continues from this evolving classified documents scandal which even some Democratic strategists are saying is turning into a serious problem for the White House.
The latest report indicates that lawyers for President Biden found more documents at his Delaware home than had previously been disclosed. What’s odd here is that it’s Biden’s own attorneys doing the searching, not the FBI or National Archives. It’s pretty convenient that Biden’s own people are the ones rummaging around which seems like a gross conflict of interest.
As the Associated Press reports, there still hasn’t been a firm accounting established of just how many classified documents Biden has been holding on to and where they’re being held:
Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday.
White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there.
The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration is under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Department of Justice.
That’s another insane aspect here. Biden’s attorneys don’t have security clearances to even glance over the documents they’re searching for. They shouldn’t even be holding them yet they’ve been the ones tasked with searching for classified material and reporting what they find. Seems like a rather gaping breach of protocol which is why they were forced to stop their search.
Biden’s layers also confirmed, after requests, that no visitor logs exist for Biden’s Delaware home:
There are no visitor logs for President Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, the White House Counsel’s Office said in a Monday statement.
Republicans on Capitol Hill demanded the visitor logs this weekend following revelations that Biden’s lawyers had discovered a stash of classified documents inside the home’s garage. While it is common practice to keep comprehensive visitor logs at the White House, Biden’s lawyers say no such record exists for his home in Delaware.
Given the number of years removed from the Obama administration and the years of time which these documents could span, it’s impossible to know what Joe Biden has and where it’s stored. After this amount of time, Joe Biden himself probably has no clue which makes the matter more of an issue.
Listen to the first few minutes of this exchange with former Clinton advisor David Gergen with Anderson Cooper. Biden’s going to get “creamed” on his handling of the document scandal according to Gergen:
There is, however, a familiar feel about how the Biden White House is handling this crisis, which is similar to how it handles just about every crisis. The key strategy is to ignore it for as long as possible before a simmering issue erupts into a major issue. It happened with Afghanistan, it’s still happening with the southern border, it happened with the baby formula crisis, and it’s happening with transportation infrastructure.
There is a glaring double standard being applied in this case despite the fact that the DOJ has appointed a special counsel. In many prior examples, people have been promptly arrested or at the very least subject to exhaustive searches and harassment merely for even holding a single classified document.
This remains a developing story that’s still expanding with daily twists and turns. Stay tuned.
