Miranda Devine: There’s No Hiding Biden’s Fright Over Classified Document Scandal
Joe Biden is panicking.
Amazing fifth trove of classified documents was discovered in the president’s Delaware mansion Friday, not by his own lawyers this time, but during a more thorough, 13-hour search by the Department of Justice while he holed up in his beach house in Rehoboth, which ought to be next on the DOJ search list.
Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland has had the audacity to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden.
Ron Klain, his trusted factotum for the long-term, is bailing him out.
Someone at the White House is dumping his trusted longtime executive assistant Kathy Chung under a bus. The Washington Post reported last week that an anonymous insider said Chung was being fired. “has confided to associates that she is distressed that she might have inadvertently been involved in moving or storing classified material at the center, planting the seeds of the current uproar.” The fact that the loyal Chung was personally poached by Hunter Biden in 2012 to work for his father in the VP’s office apparently counts for nothing when it comes to offloading blame from the president.
That’s why Biden looked like a cornered rat in California last week (with aspiring heir Gavin Newsom leering over his shoulder) and lied through his teeth.
He snapped at the reporter asking about the scandal, then dismissed the question. “a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place.”
Garland was effectively warned by him.
“I think you’re gonna find there’s nothing there,” he told reporters. “I have no regrets … There’s no there there.”
Is there any? What a joke.
The no-there-there defense may have worked for Biden back in the 2020 campaign, when he repeatedly claimed to know nothing about his son’s overseas business dealings, and when the mythology of “Honest Joe” hadn’t collapsed, but no more. Too much evidence has emerged from Hunter’s laptop, from Hunter’s former business partners, from the “Twitter files” and from FBI whistleblowers Allegations of a cover-up in staggering proportions
The White House kept the first tranche of at most 10 classified documents secret until after the midterm election. It was reportedly found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at Penn University in the fall. CNN reports that they were dated between 2013-2016 and contained US intelligence memos, briefing materials, and information on Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom.
Portfolio Ties to Hunter
This is the thread that links the president to the long-running Delaware federal investigation into his son’s foreign business dealings.
This three-year period corresponds with the most intense influence-peddling activity abroad by Hunter Biden and his brother Jim Biden. They made millions of dollars from shady investments in Ukraine, China and Russia.
What would their product be worth if they could access classified documents?
Their activity is documented in the Hunter laptop, in financial documents held by the Treasury, and in testimony from Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, who said Joe was the “big guy” A particularly lucrative Chinese deal will give you 10%.
Hunter traveled with his father on Air Force 2 to do business during that time, including to China in Dec 2013. Joe was invited to the Cafe Milano dinner by Joe, where he met his business partners from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
After his separation from his wife in July 2015, Hunter lived off and on at his father’s Delaware mansion and listed it as his residence on official documents. He was photographed in 2017 driving his father’s CorvetteThe garage in which classified documents were discovered was where the containing the.
Hunter also had free rein in his dad’s White House office, and his privileged access meant his name never showed up on visitor logs. He took, for example, the famous photo of his father.“best friend in business,” Devon Archer, with his father in the VP’s office in April 2014, shortly before the pair joined the board of the corrupt Ukrainian oil company Burisma, which paid Hunter $83,000 a month. This photo appeared briefly on Burisma’s website before it was taken down by a White House lawyer.
One striking email from this period stands out. It was sent by Hunter to Archer on April 13, 2014. This was a week before Joe Biden visited Ukraine, where he met then-Prime Minster Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “my guys upcoming travels.”
For Hunter, it was an uncharacteristically lengthy email, listing 22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s “destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk.
“The strategic value is to create a land bridge for RU to Crimea. That won’t directly affect Burisma holdings but it will limit future UK exploration and utilization of offshore opportunities in particular,” Hunter wrote.
“It will also result in further destabilization of UK nationally and for whatever govt is in power. And the US will respond with even stronger sanctions. Those sanctions will threaten the tenuous support of the EU which does not have the political will to incur steep energy price increases.”
Point 22 Hunter directed Archer to purchase a “burner phone,” They do so presumably in order to keep their conversations confidential. “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.”
It’s a prescient and very well-informed email, unlike anything else Hunter wrote in the nine years covered in the laptop, and it has the distinct flavor of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.
The latest batch
The last four tranches of classified documents were discovered in President Biden’s Delaware mansion during four separate searches — between Dec. 20 and Friday.
While there is no indication of the subject matter, Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer issued a statement Saturday evening saying the DOJ search the previous day had discovered “six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”
This country is now facing the historic spectacle that a sitting president and a former President, Donald Trump, are both under investigation by special counsel for improper retention of classified information.
Biden hasn’t faced the FBI raid and leaking abuses that his predecessor endured, but it’s the same crime and, in Biden’s case, there is a hell of a lot of there there.
Robert Hur, special counsel, will do his job well and compare notes with David Weiss (Delaware US Attorney), who has been investigating Hunter’s case since 2018.
Joe Biden is going to have to face the truth, and it won’t be easy for dark money groups to leak false stories to the media.
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