CBS News seems to have broken the story that Vice President Biden left office with classified documents in 2017. The New York Post follows up here. The Washington Post story here (behind the Post paywall) carries the bylines of four reporters.
All the stories on the related investigation cite the statement of Biden attorney Richard Sauber. I have tracked down the statement on Twitter (below). Sauber’s statement implicitly distinguishes this case from the Trump Mar-Lago case. Every one of the news stories follows Sauber, although the news stories make the distinctions explicit.
The Trump documents locked up at Mar-a-Lago of course warranted an FBI raid and represented an existential threat to the United States if not Mother Earth. CBS News helpfully adds that the documents removed by Biden “did not contain nuclear secrets” according to “[a] person familiar with the matter[.]” So there is that.
Statement from White House Counsel’s Office on cooperation with the National Archives: pic.twitter.com/Wu55efv1DE
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) January 9, 2023
The classified documents are said to have been discovered in the Penn Biden Center on November 2. Now the story can be told, I guess.
The Trump matter has been assigned to a Special Counsel. The Biden matter has not been assigned to a Special Counsel. Rather, according to the CBS News story, Garland has directed Trump-appointed United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch, Jr. to “review [the] documents.” That’s not much of an assignment.
Further into the story CBS News adds that Lausch is “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.” We’re not holding our breath.
Here is the second paragraph of the Washington Post story:
The White House confirmed the ongoing inquiry and said it is cooperating with the Justice Department and quickly handed over the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration — the agency tasked with handling presidential records. Roughly 10 documents were found, said one person familiar with the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The discovery was first reported by CBS News.
Four Post reporters have their byline on the story. They are apparently unable to make “one person” agree with the pronoun “they” — unless “they” is the preferred pronoun of that “one person.”
There is much more of substance that could be said, but I will limit myself to this comment. I long for the day when President Biden leaves office for good with or without classified documents. He is doing incalculable damage to the country through his official acts right now. Unfortunately, CBS News and the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media are carrying his water.
STEVE adds: This story reminds me a bit of Reagan’s first election campaign for governor in 1966, when Pat Brown’s campaign released a copy of the deed to one of Reagan’s ranch properties that included an old racially discriminatory covenant (which had long since been ruled unenforceable by the federal courts). Reagan replied that it was in the “fine print” that no one ever reads, to which Brown blasted back, “Who wants a governor who doesn’t read the fine print of the law?” The media ran with it, of course.
Well guess what? A lawyer—who happened to be my father’s lawyer for many commercial transactions—looked into Pat Brown’s property deeds and found the exact same racially restrictive clauses. The media: never mind, move along. Nothing to see here.
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