Biden explains

President Biden held a joint press conference yesterday with Prime Minister Trudeau and President López Obrador in Mexico City. The White House has posted the transcript here.

The press conference followed a meeting at the so-called Three Amigos Summit. I would prefer to think of them as the Three Egregios. They are egregiously destructive leaders. North America is in bad hands.

Following a reading of prepared statements by the Three Egregios, Biden stated that he was having trouble hearing before calling on AP reporter Colleen Long to ask the first question. She asked whether Biden could “explain how classified documents ended up in one of [his] offices” and whether “the public get — have been notified sooner[.]” Anticipating the question, Biden read from a prepared statement to respond.

Jonathan Turley relates in a New York Post column this morning that, according to reports, the clearly marked classified documents include those at the highly classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” (TS/SCI) level and include material related to Iran, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

The short answer to the Long question is that Biden couldn’t explain and wouldn’t say anything about why the public had not been notified sooner. Every sentence in Biden’s statement is questionable in itself or raises more questions:

Well, let me get rid of the easy one first. People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously.

How do we know that? Maybe because he called out President Trump as “totally irresponsible” for doing what Biden did before we knew that Biden himself had done the same thing.

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 — the four years after being Vice President, I was a professor at Penn.

What were Biden’s lawyers doing “clearing out [your] office at the University of Pennsylvania”? And by the way, what classes did Biden teach when he was “a professor at Penn” on a salary of $390,000 a year? Or was that just another Biden family business in which you took laundered money from a foreign government?

They found some documents in a box — you know, 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 that were taken there to that office.

“At least a closet”! He was briefed about the “discovery” —

But I don’t know what’s in the documents. I’ve — 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, and — which I hope will be finished soon, and will be more detail at that time.

We look forward to that time.

Please see Alana Goodman’s Washington Free Beacon story revisiting China’s foreign contributions to the University of Pennsylvania. Goodman reports that foreign donations to the University of Pennsylvania more than tripled in the two years after the Penn Biden “think tank” opened, with most of the $61 million coming from China. Goodman links to her own 2021 Free Beacon story reporting on the Chinese donations to Penn.

Goodman has the money quote: “Stephen MacCarthy, a spokesman for the University of Pennsylvania, dismissed the notion of any link between the Penn Biden Center and the foreign donations to UPenn, which surged after the think tank launched. ‘One hundred percent of the budget for the Penn Biden Center comes from university funds,’ he told the Free Beacon on Tuesday.”

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