Biden’s whirlwind final days as vice president had aides scrambling to close his White House office
The early days of 2017 were a whirlwind for Vice President Joe Biden: swearing in a new Congress, a surprise Medal of Freedom, a speech at Davos and one final trip to Ukraine.
As Biden was busy keeping busy, however, his office was shutting down. Aides scrambled to pack up his workspaces in the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and at his official residence, the Naval Observatory.
Those competing objectives – to use his office until the final minutes even as it was obliged to shut down – made for a muddled and hurried process that left aides packing boxes of documents and papers late into the night, even as more material kept arriving.
Exactly how a small batch of classified documents ended up in boxes of Biden’s personal effects remains an open question. The White House and the now-president’s lawyers have refused to say who, precisely, packed and moved the material. Those questions are now central to a special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material after leaving the White House in 2017.
This account of how Biden’s aides wound down his vice presidential office, as well as new details about the classified documents they placed with personal items, is based on interviews with former and current administration officials and others familiar with the process.
At a minimum, the placement of the secret documents alongside “personal and political papers” reveals a records retention process gone awry. It was a manilla folder marked “VP personal” that contained one of the classified documents that was first discovered last November by the Biden attorney, setting off the chain of events, according to one person familiar with the find.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/politics/biden-documents-final-days-vice-president-aides-scramble/index.html
Sorry to disappoint you.
Cope.
The early days of 2017 were a whirlwind for Vice President Joe Biden: swearing in a new Congress, a surprise Medal of Freedom, a speech at Davos and one final trip to Ukraine.
As Biden was busy keeping busy, however, his office was shutting down. Aides scrambled to pack up his workspaces in the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and at his official residence, the Naval Observatory.
Those competing objectives – to use his office until the final minutes even as it was obliged to shut down – made for a muddled and hurried process that left aides packing boxes of documents and papers late into the night, even as more material kept arriving.
Exactly how a small batch of classified documents ended up in boxes of Biden’s personal effects remains an open question. The White House and the now-president’s lawyers have refused to say who, precisely, packed and moved the material. Those questions are now central to a special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material after leaving the White House in 2017.
This account of how Biden’s aides wound down his vice presidential office, as well as new details about the classified documents they placed with personal items, is based on interviews with former and current administration officials and others familiar with the process.
At a minimum, the placement of the secret documents alongside “personal and political papers” reveals a records retention process gone awry. It was a manilla folder marked “VP personal” that contained one of the classified documents that was first discovered last November by the Biden attorney, setting off the chain of events, according to one person familiar with the find.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/politics/biden-documents-final-days-vice-president-aides-scramble/index.html
Sorry to disappoint you.
Cope.
