Joe Biden finally has weighed in on the classified documents that were found in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.
But if you listen closely to what he says, what he claims doesn’t make a lot of sense.
“People know I take classified documents, classified information, seriously. When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania — they set up an office for me, a secure office in the Capitol — when I– four years after being vice president I was a professor at Penn. They found some documents in a box, in a locked cabinet, or at least a closet. And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box. And they did what they should have done — they immediately called the archives, immediately called the archives, turned them over to the archives. And I was briefed about this discovery, and surprised to learn that there were any government records taken there to that office. But I don’t know what’s in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. I’ve turned over the boxes, they’ve turned over the boxes to the Archives. And we’re cooperating fully, cooperating fully with the review, which I hope will be finished some and there’ll be more detail at that time.
Now, he’s had since November to come up with a better response, and this is what he offers up?
He acts like the documents just dropped out of the sky and he has no idea how they got there. He claims he’s surprised that “any government records were taken there to that office.” That in and of itself should raise a lot of questions. Does he just have records floating out in the wind like that? Where else did he take records? If he doesn’t have a reasonable explanation for these, how many others are there out there? And as I noted, they had to go somewhere else in the interim before they got to that office in 2018, if they were records from when he was VP.
Then what he says is a little off, in a couple of respects. No, it wasn’t a “secure office in the Capitol” — it was in Washington, D.C., but it was part of the Penn Biden Center of the University of Pennsylvania, not “in the Capitol.” How secure that is a big question. And he seems unclear as to even where they were found in a locked cabinet “or at least a closet.” It’s not clear at all how many people may have had access to that closet or that office, particularly since he hasn’t been there, presumably since 2019. Then it’s also concerning now that there are reports that the documents include records about Ukraine, Iran, and the U.K. — so did these documents pertain to any Biden conflicts? No, he wasn’t a “professor” at Penn four years after he was vice president – he never was a full professor and he stopped giving talks or whatever he pretended was “teaching” in 2019, when he ran for president.
So I’m confused here. He hasn’t been associated with pretending to teach at Penn since 2019. Why are they only cleaning out the office in Nov. 2022? Or is he being confusing and saying that they found it earlier? With Biden, you can never be sure.
Meanwhile, CBS, which broke the original report, is saying that the FBI is also now involved and has learned some of those documents were designated highly classified.
In a letter to Stuart Delery, the White House counsel, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, of Kentucky, wrote the committee “is concerned that President Biden has compromised (intelligence) sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents.”
Comer has asked the White House to turn over all records and communications related to the material marked as classified in Mr. Biden’s personal office, including the classified documents themselves, by Jan. 24.