New Evidence Puts the Lie to Biden’s Doc Defense
Multiple White House aides handled and moved the classified material before Biden admitted to having it.
Joe Biden is one crooked and dishonest dude, as more and more Americans are realizing. The ongoing saga of his mishandling of classified documents provides yet more evidence.
Just when we thought we’d have to put out a “missing persons” alert for Special Counsel Robert Hur, the man tasked by Attorney General Merrick Garland with investigating Biden’s classified docudrama — and, we expected, to make it go away — out comes a new twist. White House Counsel’s Office spokesperson Ian Sams announced last week that Biden had been interviewed in Hur’s probe. It was a “voluntary interview” and Sams says it proves Biden is “cooperating with this investigation.”
Is he, though?
We were told one of the big differences between Biden’s classified docs case and that of Donald Trump is that Trump obstructed the investigation whereas Biden immediately followed protocol when the documents were discovered. Except that might be yet another Biden lie.
Republicans in the House are continuing to investigate, including for the impeachment inquiry, and there’s an increasing intersection between their probe and Hur’s. In fact, Republicans have requested documents from Hur’s investigation that may relate to the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent a letter to Hur Monday, saying in part, “The Committee seeks to further understand why President Biden retained certain classified documents, if such information related to any of his family’s foreign business interactions, and why so many White House officials were involved in obtaining these materials.”
More on that last part in a minute. First, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley took to The Hill to explain some of the recent findings.
This week, the House Oversight Committee released a new timeline on the discovery of classified documents in various locations associated with Biden. From the outset, many of us flagged problems with the account that had been given by Biden, who insisted that he had no knowledge or involvement in the removal or use of the documents.
The most glaring problem is that, after they were removed at the end of his term as vice president, the documents were repeatedly moved and divided up. Some were found in the Penn Center office used by Biden in Washington, D.C. Others were found in his garage and reportedly in his library.
The rub, says Turley, is that it now “appears that a critical claim by the White House in the scandal may not only be false, but was knowingly false at the time it was made.” He then works through the evidence. Annie Tomasini, a White House aide and close friend of Hunter Biden, “inspected the classified material on March 18, 2021, two months after Biden took office — nearly 20 months before they were said to be found by the Biden team.” She was one of several White House aides who did so.
Republicans say the White House “omitted” communications and visits that were pertinent to the timeline, which, if true, Turley says “demolishes” the original White House account.
Put another way, while Biden was insisting that his team immediately “did what they should have done,” the truth is that repeated searches were conducted and documents were moved. That includes by Biden’s legal team, which Turley says “may have consolidated material and contaminated the scene by the time FBI agents conducted their searches.”
Call us MAGA extremists, but messing with evidence and lying to investigators sure seems like obstruction of justice to us.
Turley concludes by quoting Special Counsel Jack Smith, who’s investigating Trump. “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith said. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
AG Garland said the same thing earlier this month: “We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats. We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends. We don’t have one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, for the rich or for the poor, or based on ethnicity. We have only one rule, and that one rule [is that we] follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”
The proof is in the pudding. Will Biden face even a tough question from the press, much less real legal accountability? Don’t hold your breath. The evidence is growing that he did the same thing Trump is accused of doing, except that Biden was merely a senator and then vice president when he pilfered the documents. And yes, in more ways than one with Biden, the emphasis is on “vice.”