Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day; may our country continue its path to equality, liberty, and justice for all.
On the menu today: There are now at least three groups of classified documents that were kept in President Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and at his home in Wilmington, Del., and yet the White House is sticking with the absurd defense that the president takes handling classified information “very seriously.” We still haven’t gotten any explanation as to why Biden’s personal lawyers were going through his papers at the center, although I have my suspicions. A Democratic senator now insists that the public just doesn’t care about politicians’ mishandling of classified information. Meanwhile, I ask whether all this information really needs to be classified in the first place.
Sorry, No, You Can’t Classify Biden as ‘Serious’ in Protecting Classified Documents
Back on November 2, 2022 — before the midterm elections — one of Biden’s personal lawyers, Patrick Moore, was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located in D.C., going through old papers from Biden’s time as vice president.
We haven’t gotten much of an explanation as to why, two years into Biden’s presidency, this was happening. Did the coverage of former president Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago spur someone on Biden’s team to worry that classified documents had gotten mixed in with Biden’s nonclassified personal papers?
In late September, Biden had appeared on 60 Minutes and asked, with stern disapproval, how anyone could possibly be so irresponsible as to take classified information out of a government facility. Did that make one or more of Biden’s staffers belatedly realize they had likely demonstrated the same irresponsibility?
The Washington Post reports, quoting people familiar with the matter, that “some of the classified material found in the Biden Penn Center office was marked top secret.” Moore and another unnamed Biden lawyer contacted the National Archives to arrange the return of the documents. Late on November 4, 2022, the National Archives Office of Inspector General contacted the U.S. Department of Justice, informing them that classified documents had been stored in an insecure location.
(Recall that the presence of security at a location, whether in the form of security guards, locks, or the U.S. Secret Service, does not mean it is considered secure for the storage of classified information. Classified documents are not supposed to leave government buildings, period.)
The midterm elections were held November 8. If the public had known of Biden’s documents scandal, would it have changed the outcome? It probably wouldn’t have had a big impact, but it would have generated at least one bad and embarrassing news cycle for the president and his party at the worst possible time. Democrats who had spent the summer tearing into former president Trump for taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago would have had to spend a few days tap-dancing and insisting that what Biden did wasn’t that bad, that everyone makes these kinds of mistakes, and that it’s no big deal. Republicans won most of the close House races in 2022, but who knows, maybe one bad news cycle right before Election Day could have cost Democrats 310 votes in New Mexico’s second congressional district; 1,632 votes in Colorado’s eighth district; 1,842 votes in Connecticut’s fifth district; or 2,633 votes in Washington’s third district. And as we all saw in the recent battle to determine the speaker of the House, a few more Republican House members could have had big consequences. (Also note that in Nevada, GOP Senate candidate Adam Laxalt fell just 7,928 votes short of defeating incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto.)
Then, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, on December 20, President Biden’s personal counsel notified U.S. Attorney John Lausch that additional documents bearing classification markings were identified in the garage of the president’s private residence in Wilmington, Del. And this past weekend, President Biden’s lawyers found six more pages of documents with classification markings at the Wilmington residence.
The argument from the Biden team is that this situation is completely different from former president Trump’s because the current president and his people aren’t hiding anything. And yet, these documents were found before the midterms, and no one revealed any of this to the public until January 9.
The Biden team response is to insist that they’re taking everything very seriously and committed to being transparent, while simultaneously saying they can’t answer even the most basic questions because there is an ongoing investigation. Karine Jean-Pierre’s press briefings are getting ridiculous:
Q: As far as you know, is it ever okay for classified documents to be mixed with personal effects?
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: What I can say — look, what I can say is what the President has said before, what I have said multiple times. We take this very seriously. The President takes a classified information, classified documents very seriously. But, look, you know, I’ve said this — I’ve said this before: We have addressed this issue multiple times at length. And we have been fully cooperating with the Department of Justice. And now we will be doing the same with the special counsel’s office.
Out of — just to be prudent here and just to make sure that we are consistent, I would refer anything that is related to this to the — as it relates to the review — to the Department of Justice or my colleagues at the White House Counsel Office. And this is — we see it as the best way to move forward.
We want to respect the process. And so, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to refer you to Department of Justice.
Of course, the Department of Justice and White House Counsel’s Office aren’t answering any questions, just putting out anodyne press statements that raise yet more questions. The press briefing continued:
Q: Just to be clear: You’re confident he followed whatever protocol was in place?
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Again, this is something that he takes very seriously — the President — when it comes to classified documents, when it comes to classified information.
I mean . . . no, Biden does not take handling classified information very seriously. If he did, it is unlikely we would find classified documents in three places in his private home and office. Finally, notice how Jean-Pierre treats the most routine questions as if the reporter is being ridiculous and asking for miracles:
Q: The President has said he hopes to speak about this soon. When can people expect to hear from him about this?
MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Don’t have — again, that’s a — that is — that is something that I can’t — I don’t have a magic wand here. I don’t know when that’s going to happen.
There really isn’t any good defense for Biden; yesterday on Meet the Press, Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow had no choice but to admit it was embarrassing and immediately pivot to playing the “ordinary Americans don’t care about classified documents” card:
CHUCK TODD: [Biden] said what Donald Trump did was careless. Does he have to eat those words considering what happened with him?
SEN. DEBBIE STABENOW: Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. Right? I mean, it’s embarrassing that you would find a small number of documents, certainly not on purpose. They don’t think it’s the right thing and they have been moving to correct it, working with the Department of Justice, working with everyone involved with the archives. And so from my perspective, you know, it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened. But what I’m most concerned about, and this is the kind of thing that the Republicans love, we just heard it from my colleagues, Senator Johnson, let’s talk about investigations, let’s create chaos. Let’s not talk about the fact that we have a manufacturing renaissance going on in this country. More jobs created, lower unemployment rate, higher wages. And what they’re proposing to do that would interfere with that would really put us on the edge economically. They don’t want to talk with us about how to move the country forward. And I can tell you people in Michigan, they want folks that are going together, get things done, that care about their families and aren’t interested in all of this just chaos and investigations.
Over in that big Washington publication, I point out that no matter how you feel about President Biden or former president Trump, people who do have access to classified material have argued that the federal government has a long-standing “overclassification” problem. They contend that the government classifies too much material — some of which isn’t all that secret, apparently — and moves far too slowly to declassify it. Of course, those of us without security clearances can’t see the documents for ourselves to determine if these arguments, which have gone on for years, are valid. The 9/11 Commission report said that overclassification prevented vital information from being shared within the government in a timely fashion.
The overclassification problem doesn’t get Biden or Trump off the hook, but it does explain how easily classified papers could get mixed in with a departing president’s or vice president’s personal papers. Of course, the effort to mitigate overclassification has had little effect over the past few decades, and now any argument that the government classifies too much information will be rejected as an effort to excuse Biden or Trump.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Howard Kurtz for having me on his Media Buzz program on Fox News yesterday morning. Thanks to everyone who watched, except the one guy on Twitter who thought that I was actually defending California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell when I said Swalwell had “penetrated Chinese intelligence.”