In his own discreet way, President Joe Biden’s “personal” attorney Bob Bauer is back in the news again. On Saturday, Bauer released a statement about a new discovery of documents chez Biden.
According to Bauer, the Justice Department "took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including 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."
This same CBS News report notes that this new find comes after 10 or so classified documents “were discovered by Mr. Biden's personal lawyers at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2.” Others were found at his home on December 20.
Bauer goes unmentioned in those earlier finds, but he almost surely had to be one of those “personal lawyers.” Six days before the midterms, these attorneys made the strategic decision not to go public with their find. In Bauer’s case, I suspect the decision to go public after the election was strategic as well—but not necessarily on Biden’s behalf.
Bauer, of course, has a history of blocking the release of certain documents and then strategically releasing them. In the way of background, on August 21, 2008, a week prior to the Democratic National Convention, Democrat attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.
A former deputy attorney general for the State of Pennsylvania and a credible pro-choice gubernatorial candidate in a Democrat primary against sitting governor Robert Casey, Berg expected to be taken seriously. He wasn’t. The media expressed zero interest in his suit.
Obama and the Democratic National Committee took a good deal of interest. Defending Obama’s interest was Bauer, then a top gun from the Deep State’s go-to law firm, Perkins Coie. Bauer served as general counsel to the DNC and as personal lawyer to Obama during the 2008 campaign. In that capacity Bauer led the legal fight against Berg.
On November 12, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the suit. The day after the suit was dismissed, the New York Times reported that White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, was stepping down from his job. An anonymous source told the Times that Bauer would be taking over, and the source knew whereof he spoke.
Bob Bauer in the Oval Office 20101 as White House Counsel
Extracted from a photo by White House official photographer Pete Souza(public domain)
With the media averting their collective gaze, a federal judge felt free to dismiss Berg’s narrowly tailored suit without a hearing. “I was deprived of my due process rights to be heard,” Berg would write. “Judge Surrick made some outlandish comments claiming Obama had been properly vetted, and that was completely untrue.” Berg’s claim here is accurate. The media’s failure to investigate Obama’s background is a scandal in its own right.
After blocking the release of his birth certificate for more than two years, Obama decided in April 2011 to produce the certificate or at least something like it. Donald Trump was giving him fits.
“Finally I decided I’d had enough,” Obama writes of Trump’s challenge in his memoir, A Promised Land. “I called in White House counsel Bob Bauer and told him to go ahead and obtain the long-form birth certificate from its home in a bound volume, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hawaii Vital Records office.” Bauer dispatched Obama’s personal attorney Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, to secure two copies.
Overriding staff objections, Obama went live on national TV in late April 2011 to address the birth certificate issue. The timing was strategic. Planning was well underway for the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout.
Still failing to appreciate how gingerly the media treated him, Obama writes, “I began by remarking on the fact that the national TV networks had all decided to break from their regularly scheduled programming to carry my remarks live—something they very rarely did.”
Yes, very rarely. Arguably, the last comparable breakaway for a personal matter took place on July 25, 1969, when the networks gave Ted Kennedy fifteen minutes to assure America there was “no truth whatsoever” to any rumors of immoral conduct between him and the late Mary Jo Kopechne.
After explaining the problems America faced, Obama scolded the “carnival barkers” for distracting its citizens. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” he said angrily. “We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them—not on this.”
Less than a week after the announcement, Osama bin Laden was killed, and the birther controversy was buried along with him. A month later, Bauer returned to private practice so he could once again represent the Obama campaign and the DNC. Said Obama of Bauer at the time, “He has exceptional judgment, wisdom, and intellect, and he will continue to be one of my close advisers.”
Bauer would offer that advice from the plush offices of the firm to which he returned, Perkins Coie. In April 2016, when the DNC learned that its computers had been hacked, its staff alerted Perkins Coie, and the firm, in turn, recommended a private cyber security outfit called CrowdStrike to clean up the mess. No need to bring in the FBI. (As shall be seen, it was CrowdStrike that took control of Seth Rich’s laptop. More to come,)
That same memorable year, 2016, it was Perkins Coie that retained Fusion GPS to create the infamous Steele dossier. Would a firm capable of commissioning the Steele dossier have trouble dummying up a birth certificate?
Would an attorney whom Obama called “one of my close advisers” be one Biden would want to trust? As Joel Gilbert has warned in his prescient book and documentary, Michelle Obama 2024, the Obamas may have other plans for the White House than Biden’s continued occupancy.