As a New Batch of Classified Documents Emerges, Assessing Biden’s Statements about the First Batch

As news is breaking about a second batch of classified documents that President Biden illegally retained in an unauthorized location after the Obama administration ended, a few observations are in order regarding what he has had to say about all this so far.

Our Caroline Downey reported last night on Biden’s first comments on the matter of the first batch of documents — approximately ten, at least some of which are designated “top-secret/sensitive compartmented information,” meaning they are highly classified and that their falling into the wrong hands could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” and could compromise sources and methods of intelligence acquisition.

Biden first did what he habitually does, which is to assert that “people know” some supposed attribute of his that, in fact, is neither an attribute of his nor believed by “people” to be one. In this instance, he said, “People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously.” We don’t know any such thing. The most sensitive thing Biden is known to have handled in his long political career is the pullout from Afghanistan, an utter catastrophe of his own making. He is a notorious plagiarist and résumé inflater whose best-known trait is to say with brimming confidence things that are not only untrue but easily demonstrated to be untrue. Everything about him screams sloppy and erratic, which is why White House aides charged with damage control hold their breath every time he speaks. There is absolutely no reason to believe he is any more careful in his handling of classified intelligence than in his handling of anything else.

The president went on to say:

I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office. But I don’t know what’s in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were.

Where to begin? Biden starts this remarkable statement by lapsing into the passive voice — government records “were taken” to “that office.” It is his office, and there is every reason to believe he is personally responsible for the documents’ being in that location. Government records did not walk to Biden’s private office and end up in a closet there on their own. They were reportedly discovered in a box, intermingled with personal Biden family materials, including some related to his older son Beau’s tragic death.

The classified materials, moreover, are said to pertain, among other things, to Ukraine, Iran, and Britain. Now, consider this: (a) President Obama gave his vice president extensive foreign-policy responsibilities; and (b) after the Obama administration ended, Biden wrote a memoir, published in autumn 2017, which — while centering on Beau Biden’s death, covered his foreign-policy portfolio at length, particularly with respect to Ukraine. Given that, how surprised should we be that there is apparent overlap between the materials discovered in the box and the subject matters addressed in the memoir? Presumably, in the probe the Justice Department says it is conducting into Biden’s mishandling of the classified documents, investigators are comparing the classified documents to the foreign-relations topics covered in the memoir.

Meanwhile, the above-excerpted statement concluded with a characteristic Biden garble: “My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were.”

One assumes this is not literally what Biden meant. It is not relevant, nor would anyone care, what suggestions Biden’s lawyers didn’t make. The president must have meant that his lawyers suggested that he not ask what the documents were.

If that is the case, it’s ridiculous. Biden is the president of the United States, the official most responsible for national security. If top-secret information may have fallen into the wrong hands — a possibility that must be indulged when classified intelligence is maintained in an unauthorized place — then it is Biden’s responsibility to know what is in the documents so that he can assess the potential damage. That’s not just his duty; he is in the unique position of knowing who had access to his private office, what the security, visiting, and maintenance arrangements were in the years that the documents were apparently maintained there, and so on. Plus, it’s not like his lawyers are not going to share details with him, given that their communications are covered by attorney–client privilege.

This is yet another instance of politicians insinuating lawyers into tasks that do not call for a lawyer — and why, we are left to wonder, would Biden need lawyers for the ostensibly ministerial task of packing up an office? Using lawyers certainly suggests that Biden was aware that the pack-up could trigger legal complications.

Why do politicians do this? Because the presence of lawyers enables the politician to make the facile claim that he can’t say much about a controversy on the advice of counsel (which isn’t true — nothing prevents Biden from addressing this matter publicly). And it lays the groundwork for the politician to claim, à la Hillary Clinton in the emails caper, that the attorney–client privilege limits what government investigators may properly ask (which is also not true since the privilege only covers communications in the nature of legal advice between the lawyer and client, not details about a ministerial task carried out by a person who happens to be a lawyer).

It will be interesting to find out why we are learning about all of this only now, when the first batch of documents was discovered over two months ago. Obviously, Biden should have disclosed this earlier, but if he was going to delay for this long, why not wait until a thorough search of all potential locations had been done, and then make a single disclosure about all classified documents? The president doesn’t seem to have gone about this in the manner of someone who “take[s] classified documents and classified information seriously.”