The FBI apparently concluded its search of President Biden’s home at Rehoboth Beach, Del., around noon, after approximately three hours. Fox News reports that the president’s private lawyer, Bob Bauer, says that the agents found no additional classified documents. He stressed that the search was consensual.
I have a column about this latest search up on the home page, and another from Tuesday evening about the revelation that, in mid-November, the FBI searched Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. That was approximately two weeks after Biden’s lawyers found the first batch of classified documents there. On January 20, as I recounted here, the FBI searched the president’s Wilmington home; that was after classified documents had been found there on December 20 (in the garage) and January 12 (in the den).
At this late date, there really should not have been any classified documents to find at Rehoboth. The Biden team had three months’ notice that this day was coming. Prosecutors and the FBI are not in the habit of giving suspects months of notice that they’re coming to conduct a search for incriminating evidence.
To be sure, the FBI did find more documents at Biden’s Wilmington home even after his private lawyers had supposedly conducted thorough searches. Ergo, if you were Robert Hur, the special counsel who apparently began work on the case at the Justice Department today, you would conclude that the Rehoboth search had to be done, however unlikely it was that any proof of classified documents retention would be found at this point. Otherwise, Congress, the press, and the public would scald Hur and the bureau for failing to search the place.
Some reports estimate that, in sum, between 25 and 30 classified documents have been found. That could be true, but I wouldn’t take it to the bank. As I noted again in this morning’s column, the Biden team, in a strangely worded January 20 statement, related that FBI agents took six “items” containing classified documents out of the Wilmington home when they spent twelve hours searching it that day. We don’t know what Biden’s minions meant by “items,” let alone how many classified documents were in each item. And by then, press reports indicated that Biden’s private lawyers had found ten to twelve classified documents in the Washington think-tank office, and a smattering of documents in the Wilmington home. Furthermore, we have not been told whether the FBI found additional documents at the Penn Biden Center search conducted in mid November.
Amusingly, a spokesman for the Biden White House counsel’s office, Ian Sams, claimed today: “I think we’ve been pretty transparent from the very beginning with providing information as it occurs throughout this process.” The truth of the matter is that Biden and his aides have concealed information until events gave them no choice but to disclose.
When you hear a claim like the one made by Sams, bear in mind that the Biden White House did not admit there was a classified documents issue until January 9 — more than two months after the first discovery that Biden had been illegally hoarding sensitive intelligence for years, and an admission made only because CBS had just reported on that first discovery. More to the point, remember that when the White House made that grudging concession, it knew that classified information had also been found in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home on December 20. Yet Team Transparent said nothing about that — the garage find was concealed until the media found out about it a few days later.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings . . . but don’t hold your breath waiting for the White House to self-report.