At a time when more than a third of Americans are telling the Pew Research Foundation it’s a bad sign than more than 50 percent of young people today are living with their parents, one might think President Joe Biden was pretty lucky to have been reportedly raking in almost $50,000 a month from his son Hunter to live on the family estate in Delaware.
But in Washington whenever a special counsel is appointed to investigate you, chances are “lucky” isn’t the first word that springs to tongue. After a week during which the mishandled classified documents story whirling around Biden seemed to worsen with every new disclosure, you no longer have to be wearing a tinfoil hat to wonder if someone in The Establishment has it out for Joe and Co.
[RELATED: House Oversight to Probe Joe Biden’s Role in Hunter’s Foreign Deals…]
First, lawyers for the president discover Top Secret documents locked in a closet at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington which is not only NOT a secure facility, but has also received a jaw-dropping $30 million in donations from Chinese nationals, almost half of whom are anonymous. The President himself claims to be just as surprised about this initial discovery as anyone else.
The next bomb falls when not one, but two disclosures of improperly stored materials come from the Biden residence in Delaware. According to reports, this is the same garage in which the elder Biden keeps his Corvette, which may take it up a notch from finding them in a shed but is certainly not as secure as the basement in which Joe spent much of the 2020 campaign.
Suddenly, the clownish effect of the allegedly ketchup-stained documents recovered from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort during an FBI raid last August, months before the mid-term election, is sidelined by what is – at very best mind you – a worrisome display of sloppy incompetence by the world’s most powerful man. The first documents were found this last November, days before the election, but the priesthood of national security guardians decided it was only safe for us to learn about all this now.
Who had access to the materials in Biden’s garage all this time? We know that son Hunter was living at the family residence then, but beyond that we’re told there are no visitor logs and we’ll just have to take the Bidens’ word for that the yet-to-be-disclosed, but classified documents were as safe as bugs in a rug.
Surrogates for the president are spinning their heels. The View co-host Joy Behar threw shade on Republicans, insinuating that the documents were planted. More serious voices point to the fact that Biden aides voluntarily returned documents while Trump refused repeated requests from the National Archives. And some, like The Nation’s Jeet Heer, worry more about the “root causes” of mishandling classified material, ie. over-classification. Of course, it’s the system’s fault.
None of this addresses a key question: why were the documents there? When you leave a government job as Biden did the vice-presidency in 2017, what credible reason do you have for retaining classified material? In fairness, the same question applies to Trump. Yet Trump, unlike a mere Vice President, can at least say he had the power to declassify the documents. As the Kenny Rogers song counsels, you got to know when to hold them, and know when to fold them. Unless, of course, you believe these materials are relevant to some non-governmental pursuit.
What did the President know, and when did he know it, Watergate taught us to constantly ask. What aides were with him during the Penn-Biden years, and who in Wilmington might have had reason to access what was stored so casually there. Washington being the shark tank it is, someone is going to get thrown under the bus. It’s almost as if someone thought incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan didn’t have enough to investigate.
If Joe’s past assertion that he knew nothing about Hunter’s overseas business dealings before didn’t strain credulity enough already, the King Lear defense isn’t much for the Bidens to bank on. Someone wants them out, or none of this would be coming out – even belatedly – as it has.
“The WH keeps digging a hole deeper: they have failed to answer so many questions, which is very strange if this is all an innocent mistake,” my old friend Andrew Weissmann tweeted on Saturday, adding: “Total number of government docs found and precisely where; and what levels of classification?” The tweet continued. “Why wasn’t this all revealed in Nov/Dec?”
Why indeed?
