The truth about Biden’s document debacle: He didn’t ‘self-report’
by Andrew C. McCarthy, Opinion Contributor - 01/24/23 9:00 AM ET
With yet more classified documents seized during a long-overdue search by the FBI of the president’s Wilmington, Del., home, President Biden’s apologists are even more stridently portraying him as a cooperative public servant who “self-reported” his wrongdoing — as compared to his predecessor, who fought government efforts to acquire records he retained for well over a year.
Put aside that this is largely beside the point, the main issue being Biden’s serial violations of the federal criminal law that controls classified intelligence, not how supposedly helpful he has been to investigators. The fact is, he did not self-report — certainly not in the manner he suggests.
To “self-report” a crime, a person needs to report it to law enforcement authorities. Biden and his aides absolutely did not do that. Moreover, a close look at the timeline elucidates that the White House hoped this issue would slip quietly into a black hole, with no publicity and no criminal investigation.
On Nov. 2, 2022, the first batch of classified documents — some of which were marked “TS/SCI” (i.e., top secret, sensitive compartmented information), the classification level applied to the government’s most sensitive intelligence — were found by Biden’s private lawyers at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in an office the president used as a private citizen after his term as Obama administration vice president ended.
This was indicative of several felony offenses of federal law. First, the Penn Biden Center did not open until February 2018. Biden obviously took the documents when he left the Obama White House in January 2017, so they had to have been illegally retained at some other unauthorized location for 13 months — meaning they had to have been illegally transported at least twice. Second, Biden directed his Penn Biden Center office to be packed up by his private lawyers, who did not have security clearances (and by the way, even if they had them, that would not necessarily mean they’d be authorized to review TS/SCI documents). Causing national defense information to be exposed to unauthorized persons is also a crime.
What happened next is critical: The Biden private attorney who took the lead on the first batch of documents is Patrick Moore. Moore did not report his discovery of highly classified documents retained in an unlawful place to law-enforcement — i.e., to the FBI or the Department of Justice (DOJ). He reported them to the Biden White House.
We do not know who at the White House participated in the deliberations over what to do about the classified documents discovery. What we know is that the White House did not report the discovery to law enforcement. Instead, it reported the discovery to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), an executive agency (i.e., it reports to the president) that is essentially a records repository, not a law enforcement agency.
Moreover, NARA’s leadership, under acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall, has worked closely with the Biden administration. When former President Trump tried to assert executive privilege over government records he had retained at Mar-a-Lago, it was up to Biden — under the Presidential Records Act — to decide whether to support that claim. Politically, though, Biden did not want to be seen as participating in an investigation of his rival. To help him out of that pickle, Wall issued an edict rejecting Trump’s privilege claim, as if she had made the decision about a presidential privilege that only Biden had legal authority to make.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-h...bidens-document-debacle-he-didnt-self-report/
by Andrew C. McCarthy, Opinion Contributor - 01/24/23 9:00 AM ET
With yet more classified documents seized during a long-overdue search by the FBI of the president’s Wilmington, Del., home, President Biden’s apologists are even more stridently portraying him as a cooperative public servant who “self-reported” his wrongdoing — as compared to his predecessor, who fought government efforts to acquire records he retained for well over a year.
Put aside that this is largely beside the point, the main issue being Biden’s serial violations of the federal criminal law that controls classified intelligence, not how supposedly helpful he has been to investigators. The fact is, he did not self-report — certainly not in the manner he suggests.
To “self-report” a crime, a person needs to report it to law enforcement authorities. Biden and his aides absolutely did not do that. Moreover, a close look at the timeline elucidates that the White House hoped this issue would slip quietly into a black hole, with no publicity and no criminal investigation.
On Nov. 2, 2022, the first batch of classified documents — some of which were marked “TS/SCI” (i.e., top secret, sensitive compartmented information), the classification level applied to the government’s most sensitive intelligence — were found by Biden’s private lawyers at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in an office the president used as a private citizen after his term as Obama administration vice president ended.
This was indicative of several felony offenses of federal law. First, the Penn Biden Center did not open until February 2018. Biden obviously took the documents when he left the Obama White House in January 2017, so they had to have been illegally retained at some other unauthorized location for 13 months — meaning they had to have been illegally transported at least twice. Second, Biden directed his Penn Biden Center office to be packed up by his private lawyers, who did not have security clearances (and by the way, even if they had them, that would not necessarily mean they’d be authorized to review TS/SCI documents). Causing national defense information to be exposed to unauthorized persons is also a crime.
What happened next is critical: The Biden private attorney who took the lead on the first batch of documents is Patrick Moore. Moore did not report his discovery of highly classified documents retained in an unlawful place to law-enforcement — i.e., to the FBI or the Department of Justice (DOJ). He reported them to the Biden White House.
We do not know who at the White House participated in the deliberations over what to do about the classified documents discovery. What we know is that the White House did not report the discovery to law enforcement. Instead, it reported the discovery to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), an executive agency (i.e., it reports to the president) that is essentially a records repository, not a law enforcement agency.
Moreover, NARA’s leadership, under acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall, has worked closely with the Biden administration. When former President Trump tried to assert executive privilege over government records he had retained at Mar-a-Lago, it was up to Biden — under the Presidential Records Act — to decide whether to support that claim. Politically, though, Biden did not want to be seen as participating in an investigation of his rival. To help him out of that pickle, Wall issued an edict rejecting Trump’s privilege claim, as if she had made the decision about a presidential privilege that only Biden had legal authority to make.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-h...bidens-document-debacle-he-didnt-self-report/