Were President Biden’s personal lawyers going through his papers at the Penn Biden Center in November because they were concerned that Biden had taken classified documents with him when he had left office in January 2017? That always seemed plausible, and the explanation that Biden’s team was vacating the offices of the Penn Biden Center seemed vague and a little strange. Why is Biden moving stuff out of a university center named after him that he founded less than five years ago? And why did Biden’s personal lawyer go through boxes of documents that had already been moved at least twice before?
The notion that Team Biden was worried about the president’s “irresponsible” comments on 60 Minutes seems even more plausible now that we know former vice president Mike Pence had his personal lawyer search his residence and the office of his advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom, in recent days.
As our Caroline Downey reports:
An attorney for Pence uncovered about a dozen documents at his house and delivered them to the FBI, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN. The FBI retrieved the documents from Pence’s home on Thursday night and is now examining the records alongside the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
It would be reasonable if the revelations about Biden’s papers and the documents that Donald Trump had at Mar-a-Lago made former high-level officials nervous about the possibility of their inadvertently having brought classified papers with them, too, when they had left office. Are the personal lawyers of former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton,* and former vice presidents Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle currently going through their boxes of old documents?
* I could have mentioned Jimmy Carter, but Carter left office 42 years ago, and it seems reasonable to wonder if any secret documents Carter walked off with are still all that secret, and whether anyone in the federal government is interested in reprimanding a 98-year-old man.