According to multiple media reports, it was discovered a week prior to the midterm election that Joe Biden had removed classified documents from his term as Vice-President to a private office in the Penn Biden Center. The nature of the classified documents is unknown.
The notification from Biden lawyers to the DOJ, presumably on November 2nd, 2022, was kept under wraps until today when CBS first broke the news. It should be noted that as vice-president Joe Biden held no declassification authority, so removal of the classified material is a much larger breech than the claimed comparison to President Trump declassifying documents and taking them to Mar-a-Lago.
The motive for the public disclosure is somewhat interesting. Is the publicity through CBS, a known friendly narrative engineering firm for the interests of the Democrat apparatus, a specifically timed release against the backdrop of a DOJ decision not to prosecute President Trump for similar issues? Something to consider.
(CBS News) – […] The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. 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.,” Sauber said in a statement to CBS News.
The documents were contained in a folder that was in a box with other unclassified papers, the sources said. The sources revealed neither what the documents contain nor their level of classification. A source familiar told CBS News the documents did not contain nuclear secrets.
Sauber also said that on the same day the material was discovered, Nov. 2, the White House counsel’s office notified the National Archives, which took possession of the materials the following morning.
“The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys,” Sauber said. “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.”
A source familiar with the matter said representatives from the National Archives then notified the Justice Department.
Garland assigned U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to find out how the material marked classified ended up at the Penn Biden Center. The review is considered a preliminary step, and the attorney general will determine whether further investigation is necessary, including potentially appointing a special counsel.
Lausch was nominated to be U.S. attorney by former President Donald Trump, and he is one of only two current Trump-era U.S. attorneys still serving. The other is Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who is leading an investigation into the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Lausch recently briefed the attorney general and will eventually submit a final report to Garland. The review is expected to conclude soon.
The Penn Biden Center is a think tank about a mile from the White House, in Washington, D.C., that is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and named for the sitting president. (read more)
CTH research revealed the Mar-a-Lago document issue was essentially a nothingburger. The documents in the Trump case likely connected to the DOJ and FBI operation against the Trump campaign and administration, with much of the information being made public prior to his departure from office.
The FBI/DOJ hype around the Mar-a-Lago issue was intended to be what it was, another round of anti-Trump narrative engineering by elements of the DOJ/FBI and same entities who carried out all previous Trump-Russia antagonisms. Eventually the wild stories about nuclear secrets were even debunked and admitted by the Washington Post.
Former DNI John Ratcliffe, a man presumed to have seen the Mar-a-Lago documents, suspected the documents were essentially DOJ and FBI work products, including interviews with ‘sources’ like Igor Danchenko, from their fabricated case against President Trump. Under this scenario, the objective of the DOJ/FBI would be to avoid sunlight on their political targeting operation. The Ratcliffe viewpoint makes sense when you consider the DOJ/FBI position that no one should ever be allowed to look at those documents, including the appointed Special Master in the case, Judge Raymond Dearie, whom they fought to get removed.
If I had to hazard a guess about what classified documents VP Biden would want to take from the White House during the Obama era, they likely included some form of blackmail material in the event that Obama Inc ever tried to strong arm or threaten the Biden crime syndicate politically. Documents likely containing dirt on nefarious issues related to the Obama administration that Biden could hold as leverage, an insurance policy of sorts.
It’s interesting the name John Lausch resurfaces as he was the Chicago area DOJ selected by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review all of the DOJ/FBI material that was not being given to the House Judiciary Committee, and then act as the arbiter/negotiator for release. This was 2018.
Unknown to us at the time of the Lausch involvement in the document argument was the extent of control the Weissmann and Mueller teams had over the DOJ.
As we said at the time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has not been able to stop, stall or disrupt their ongoing activity of the corrupt DOJ and FBI elements remaining in 2017/2018. Team Mueller was simply better than Team Sessions, and they operated as an insurgency.
Jeff Sessions was marginalized and getting his ass kicked by his own department, and then eviscerated by President Trump and the media. Jeff Sessions appeared weak, ineffective and inept because the Attorney General was weak, ineffective and inept.
Sessions appointed John Lausch to the task of document review in an effort to give the outward impression that he was doing something to combat the stonewalling from inside the DOJ and FBI toward congress; a stonewalling ultimately being carried out by Andrew Weissmann and crew, that AG Jeff Sessions couldn’t control.
John Lausch was appointed by Sessions in 2018 to try and get the criticism to tamp down. However, it went nowhere. Now his name resurfaces as the arbiter of whether or not Joe Biden violated the law.