New questions in Biden classified documents investigation
Byron York
NEW QUESTIONS IN BIDEN CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS INVESTIGATION. Recently, the White House announced that President Joe Biden was interviewed for two days, Oct. 8 and 9, by Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. The news set off speculation that Hur’s investigation was reaching its end, given that prosecutors often wait until they have finished most of their information-gathering before questioning the target of the investigation.
Truth be told, we don’t know where the Hur investigation stands at this moment. But we know Republicans on Capitol Hill have discovered some intriguing new evidence that suggests the president and his legal team have not been fully honest in their statements about the case.
The discovery comes from House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), who is one of the major Republican lawmakers investigating the president’s links to son Hunter Biden’s international influence peddling. What Comer has found is that the timeline of events in the classified documents matter released by Biden’s lawyer didn’t tell the whole story — didn’t, in fact, even begin to tell the whole story. The question now is whether the information that Biden attorney Robert Bauer omitted is critical to the case.
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When the story broke, in January of this year, Bauer put out a timeline that said events began on Nov. 2, 2022, when “the president’s personal attorneys unexpectedly discovered Obama-Biden documents at the Penn Biden Center.” The center, formally the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, is part of the University of Pennsylvania and was established in 2018 to give Biden an institutional affiliation and a place to work after his vice presidential years.
Bauer’s statement immediately raised questions. What were the president’s personal attorneys doing looking around the Penn Biden Center? And why Nov. 2, 2022? What was going on then? Bauer didn’t say. But now Comer, relying on a source inside the Penn Biden Center, referred to as “Penn Biden Center Employee 1,” has new evidence to consider.
As it turns out, Nov. 2, 2022, wasn’t the beginning of the story at all. According to a new timeline created by Comer, the earliest known action was on March 18, 2021, just weeks after Biden became president. On that day, according to Comer, Annie Tomasini, a senior White House adviser, “went to the Penn Biden Center to take inventory of President Biden’s documents and materials.”
There’s nothing in the Comer timeline after that for a long time, until May 24, 2022, when Dana Remus, who was at the time White House counsel, contacted a woman named Kathy Chung, who was an assistant to Biden when Biden was vice president. Chung was at the time employed by the Defense Department. Remus sent Chung an email at Chung’s personal address for the purpose of having Chung “retrieve President Biden’s documents and materials that were located at the Penn Biden Center,” according to Comer.
Comer’s investigators have interviewed Chung. She told them that on June 28, 2022, she went to the Penn Biden Center “to pack up President Biden’s documents and materials.” Two days later, on June 30, 2022, Remus, who was just days from leaving the Biden White House, went to the Penn Biden Center. A senior Biden adviser, Anthony Bernal, and another unknown White House employee went with Remus. They went to the Penn Biden Center “to take possession of the boxes of documents and materials,” Comer wrote, “but could not fit all of the boxes into their vehicle.”
Then, the Comer timeline goes blank again until Oct. 12, 2022. On that day, yes, another senior Biden deputy, Ashley Williams, accompanied by Pat Moore, who was Biden’s personal attorney, went to the Penn Biden Center to do “the next wave of assessing of files and looking at boxes.” (That is a quote from the committee’s interview with Penn Biden Center Employee 1.) The next day, Oct. 13, according to the Comer timeline, “Ashley Williams returned to Penn Biden Center and left with ‘a few’ of President Biden’s boxes.” That information, again, came from Penn Biden Center Employee 1. That same day, Oct. 13, Bauer “texted Kathy Chung that Pat Moore had begun to sort through the boxes at Penn Biden Center,” according to the Comer timeline.
All that happened before Nov. 2, 2022, the day Bauer said Biden’s lawyers “unexpectedly discovered” classified material in the Biden papers. Comer wants to know what was going on. Why did Bauer leave all that stuff out? What else did he leave out? If the Biden papers were thought to be personal, why did at least five White House lawyers and other staffers take part in the job? “There is no reasonable explanation as to why this many White House employees and lawyers were retrieving boxes they believed only contained personal documents and materials,” Comer wrote in a letter to the White House.
When he announced the discovery of classified material, Bauer, the president’s attorney, said the legal team contacted the National Archives and Records Administration and the Justice Department on the day of the discovery, Nov. 2, 2022. Bauer said NARA “took possession of the materials the following morning.” But Comer has been looking into the events of Nov. 2. “Both the White House and Mr. Bauer … have failed to disclose that Pat Moore, President Biden’s personal attorney, scheduled a FedEx pickup with Penn Biden Center employees for November 2, 2022. The committee has uncovered that a FedEx worker showed up to Penn Biden Center on November 2, 2022 to ‘load … the documents and then [take them] down to the loading dock’ to be shipped out,” Comer wrote in his letter to the White House. “The committee finds it troublesome that boxes of documents were potentially removed from Penn Biden Center prior to NARA’s arrival and assessment.”
What was going on there? Also, what was going on with the boxes Williams is said to have removed from the Penn Biden Center a few weeks earlier, on Oct. 13, 2022? “To date, the White House has not disclosed what was in the boxes Ms. Williams retrieved or where they were delivered,” Comer said.
And why was the White House counsel, Remus, so deeply involved before the White House said it knew there were any classified documents? “The committee is concerned as to why Ms. Remus — the White House’s top lawyer — played such an integral role in gathering President Biden’s boxes that were purportedly believed to contain non-government materials,” Comer wrote. “The committee is also interested in the extent of assistance offered by the White House to assess and pack these boxes. As we now know, the boxes at Penn Biden Center held sensitive, classified materials. It is obvious to the committee that the White House and President Biden’s personal attorneys were concerned about the contents of the boxes held at Penn Biden Center months before contacting NARA.”
The short version of the story is this: There is a lot the Biden White House has not told us about the classified documents matter. Comer is asking the White House to provide more documents to the investigating committee — good luck with that — and is seeking to interview the five Biden staffers involved.
It’s the sort of information that Hur should provide in great detail in his final report. We’ll see what happens. To those Trump supporters who want to see Biden indicted because former President Donald Trump faces 37 felony counts related to the mishandling of classified documents — remember that Justice Department policy held that the president could not be indicted during the Trump years, and it still holds that the president cannot be indicted now. So an indictment of Biden is not in the cards. What is important is for the public to learn what happened — especially since the Biden White House apparently does not want us to know.
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