keepuphope Loc: Idaho

Biden's memos found in insecure office had info on Ukraine, Iran, and the UK. If he gets away with this we live under a dictatorship. And by damn Trump shouldn't be charged with nothing.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Were they discovered by an FBI SWAT team? NO?! Why didn't Merrick Garland send in his jackbooted thugs?

Who discovered them? Lawyers! Really!

Were there any Nuclear Codes? We don't know because The feckless AG hasn't announced what they were looking for and what has been found. Doesn't matter...Trump didn't have nuclear codes either.

Do VPs have the power to declassify documents? No! Only the President has the authority to declassify.

When were they discovered? You're kidding! Six days before the e******n!? How come we're only now hearing about this?

Where were they found? At Joe Biden's Think Tank at Penn State! I would have thought his think tank would be at a preschool!

How long had they been there? Whaaaaat?! Since 2017! Let's see, that was 6 years ago.

Don't the Chinese make lots of donations to Penn State? Over $50 Million!? I wonder how much access the Chinese have to these documents.

Can you say 'hypocrites' boys and girls?

keepuphope Loc: Idaho

Smedley_buzkill

Incorrect. China only "donated" 22 million to fund the think tank. (Not counting the million per year honorarium they paid Biden for some sort of bulls**t "professorship.")
Did I mention that our current Sec/State, Anthony Blinken, got around a hundred grand per year for the same thing?

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

I said over $50 million to Penn State, not the think tank at the preschool.

Belated revelation classified documents found in private Biden office turns legal, political tables
Office where documents found was part of a think tank at Ivy League university that got significant Chinese funding.

By John Solomon
Updated: January 10, 2023 - 12:40pm
Article
Dig In
When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Nov. 18 that he had named a special prosecutor to investigate former President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents found at the Mar-a-Lago compound, the government harbored a fresh secret: The current president, Joe Biden, had a similar problem.

Just two weeks earlier, Biden's lawyers disclosed to government lawyers on Nov. 2 — just six days before the midterm e******ns — that they had found sensitive government documents with classified markings inside an office that Biden used at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington after he left office as Barack Obama's vice president.

The public was kept in the dark about the startling discovery until Monday, when the White House confirmed it was cooperating with an investigation launched by the Justice Department at the request of the same National Archives that has tussled with Trump over the last year.

The belated disclosure turned the political tables on Biden, who sharply criticized Trump for his document debacle last fall, while also raising troubling new questions that will be need to be answered by a U.S. Attorney in Illinois and Congress.

Those questions include:

Are there any other documents missing from Biden's government document collection from his time as vice president?
Are there any other locations — insecure or secure — where Biden might have kept sensitive government secrets?
Did the government delay notifying the public for political or other purposes, such as sparing Biden from criticism or to keep v**ers in the dark before E******n Day?
Did any foreign powers have access to the office space where the documents were found?
The latter question took on added significance Monday night because it has been known for years that the University of Pennsylvania received extensive Chinese funding — estimated in some media reports at $54 million — around and after the time Biden announced his policy think tank was going to be part of the university's Washington program.

Republicans who chafed for months at the Biden Justice Department's records battle with Trump immediately seized on the revelation and vowed a vigorous investigation.

"Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Justice and National Archives have made compliance with the P**********l Records Act a top priority," Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the new chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told Just the News. "We expect the same treatment for President Biden, who has apparently inappropriately maintained classified documents in an insecure setting for several years."

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), a former White House physician, went even further to suggest Biden was a hypocrite, his administration guilty of a double standard and the whole episode possibly a national security risk.

"Biden knew for YEARS that he's been storing HIGHLY CLASSIFIED documents in his personal office," Jackson tweeted. "He KNEW it when FBI agents were raiding Mar-a-Lago, and he KNEW it when he appointed a partisan special counsel. HE KNEW THE WHOLE TIME BUT STILL HAD HIS DOJ GOONS PERSECUTE TRUMP!!"

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said the connection of Chinese money to the university added a troubling aspect.

"This think tank received $54 million in funding from the CCP," Biggs wrote on the T***h Social platform. "The Biden family highly concerns me."

Trump himself was glad to turn the tables Monday night on his rival.

"When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?" Trump asked in a post on T***h Social. "These documents were definitely not declassified."

For now, the first line of business — to determine whether crimes were committed or other documents are missing — will fall to U.S. Attorney John Lausch, a Trump holdover in Illinois who has been asked by Garland to lead a review of the Biden documents.

A senior government official directly familiar with the discovery told Just the News that the National Archives asked the Justice Department to open an investigation in November after a small number of classified documents — some marked top secret — were found in a closet in the Penn Biden Center in Washington, where Biden worked after he left the Obama administration.

The White House released a statement Monday evening confirming the discovery and the investigation, saying Biden's lawyers self-disclosed the existence of the documents when the office previously used by the president was being vacated for another party.

"The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings," White House special counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement after the discovery was reported by CBS and CNN. "The documents were discovered when the President's personal attorneys were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C."

Biden "used this space from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 campaign," Sauber said. "On the day of this discovery, November 2, 2022, the White House Counsel's Office notified the National Archives. The Archives took possession of the materials the following morning."

He added: "The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President's personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives."

Tom Fitton, president of the Judicial Watch watchdog group, told Just the News the Biden disclosure will have both a political and legal boomerang.

"The Biden operation hid from the American people the discovery of classified records in VP Biden's office just before November e******ns," he said. "Will there now be a raid of Biden's home?

"This development highlights the absurdity and lawlessness of the raid on Trump's home, as Biden is implicated in the very same conduct and yet is being protected by the agencies hounding Trump."

After the FBI found classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago office during a raid in August, Garland named a special prosecutor to investigate the 45th president. And Biden ridiculed Trump as "totally irresponsible" for his handling of the materials.

"How that could possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible?" Biden asked a few months ago. "And I thought what data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?"

House Republicans pounced on the revelations, vowing a vigorous investigation and noting Biden's prior comments.

"President Biden has stated that taking classified documents from the White House is 'irresponsible,'" Comer said.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that "Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice, they have to be held accountable if they don't treat Joe Biden exactly the same way they're treating President Trump."

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

There’s A Difference Between Biden And Trump’s Classified Documents Snafus, But It’s Not What You Think
BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND
JANUARY 10, 2023
6 MIN READ
Joe Biden reading classified document at his desk
IMAGE CREDIT
CAMERON SMITH/THE WHITE HOUSE/FLICKR/CROPPED
The similarities between the situations are striking, with the classified documents commingled with unclassified documents, reported ‘top secret’ documents, and the papers stored in a closet — but there’s a key distinction.

Author Margot Cleveland profile
MARGOT CLEVELAND
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@PROFMJCLEVELAND
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Nearly six years after Joe Biden’s term as vice president ended, classified materials — including some reportedly top-secret files — were discovered in the closet of a think tank housed on the sixth floor of a private D.C. office building.

The news comes less than four months after President Biden called former President Donald Trump “irresponsible” following the seizure from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home of documents marked classified. The Biden administration has already moved to preempt claims of hypocrisy by leaking the existence of a Justice Department investigation into the matter, but it is much too late to undo the double standard that led to the FBI raiding Trump’s Florida home last year.

“Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News,” yesterday’s breaking news story opened. Richard Sauber, a special counsel to President Biden who was reportedly hired by the White House in May of 2022 to assist in the administration’s response to any potential Republican-led investigations, confirmed to CBS News that the classified documents were discovered on Nov. 2, 2022.

According to Sauber, while Biden’s personal attorneys “were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.,” they discovered the documents. Unnamed sources told CBS News that the classified documents were in a folder stored within a box containing other unclassified papers.

While CBS News noted that the sources did not reveal “what the classified documents contain[ed] nor their level of classification,” CNN later reported that “the classified materials included some top-secret files with the ‘sensitive compartmented information’ designation, also known as SCI, which is used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.”

The discovery that Biden had stored classified documents at a private D.C. think tank is especially embarrassing for the president given comments he made in September 2022 when he sat down with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes.” When asked how he reacted to seeing photographs of several documents bearing classification markings seized at Mar-a-Lago, Biden remarked that he wondered, “How that could possibly happen,” and “how anyone could be that irresponsible.”

“I thought,” Biden said to Pelley, “What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?” “It’s just totally irresponsible,” Biden repeated.

While Biden has yet to personally address the discovery of the classified documents, having ignored questions on the issue from reporters covering his Mexico City summit, his administration is already spinning the story. One Biden source told CNN that the president’s “lawyers immediately contacted the National Archives and Records Administration, which started looking into the matter.” “Biden’s team cooperated with NARA, which later came to view the situation as a mistake due to lack of safeguards for documents,” the unnamed source claimed.

But the similarities between the situations remain striking, with the classified documents both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden think tank, comingled with unclassified documents, reportedly including “top secret” documents, and stored in a closet.

At least, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was private and protected by the Secret Service, while the Penn Biden Center was located at a busy D.C. office building that spanned some 10 stories and included numerous public areas, including a reception area on the roof that hosted weddings and other private events.

Nonetheless, the Biden administration seeks to squelch the controversy by focusing on his cooperation with the National Archives and Records Administration. But it is the lack of cooperation by the National Archives and Records Administration with former President Trump that marks the real difference in the situations.

Even before the Obama-Biden administration ended, former President Obama “rented a private facility in Hoffman Estates to serve as a storage place for his p**********l papers, and by October of 2016, while he was still in office, shipments of artifacts from his presidency began arriving at the suburban Chicago storage facility.” The National Archives and Records Administration would later work with Obama to ship his documents to the Chicago suburb. And the Obama documents — both classified and unclassified — remained at the Hoffman Estates location well into 2018.

As I wrote in August, shortly after the FBI’s raid on former President Trump’s home:

The only difference between the Hoffman Estates’ storage of the Obama p**********l records that began in 2016 and the Mar-a-Lago storage of Trump’s p**********l records was that the documents were technically within the possession of NARA. But even though the documents were legally the property of NARA, Obama still had the right to access the records, including the classified documents.

So if the NARA had legitimate concerns about Trump’s possession of p**********l records at Mar-a-Lago, the NARA “would have worked to arrange for the documents to be preserved under the auspices of NARA control in a location chosen by Trump, as it had done with Obama.”

But the NARA didn’t work with Trump, with the records instead suggesting that “a backbench bureaucrat’s partisan grievance spurred the FBI’s nakedly political raid on Trump.” And that is where the real double standard is seen.

Who knows, too, what classified documents the FBI might have discovered had it raided all the Biden and Obama properties mere months after they left office, as agents did to Trump?

We’ll never know that answer, though, because the NARA properly partnered with the former Obama-Biden administration. And that is the appropriate comparator to consider, not how the NARA or the DOJ responded to the recent discovery of Biden’s secreted classified documents. Of course, given their very public mistreatment of Trump, the NARA had to refer the case to the DOJ, and Attorney General Merrick Garland had to assign a U.S. attorney to investigate the matter.

But the supposed equal treatment on display now does not undo the NARA’s partisan targeting of Trump that began the day he walked out of the White House for the last time. Nonetheless, it is quite satisfying to watch the Biden administration eat crow.