Classified files found at President's former office...
-
Oh, no charges for this one either.
The president’s explanation does not address how and why he shared classified material with a ghostwriter, but it shines a light on the longtime assistant who was in charge of packing his papers, Kathy Sang-ok Chung.
Chung, an old friend of Hunter Biden, began working for Joe Biden in 2012 when he was vice president. She told investigators she oversaw the transfer of the contents of Biden’s file cabinets and desk drawers into 15 boxes when he moved out of the West Wing in January 2017. While other office material did go to the National Archives, Hur rebuked Biden for keeping more than 600 pages of classified information – including military secrets and intelligence sources and methods – in unlocked and unauthorized containers at multiple locations, including a tattered box in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home. The stash included information marked “top secret” involving Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Some of the secrets are compartmented by codewords and can only be stored and read in a secure facility known as a SCIF.
The Biden documents that Chung herself packed, unpacked, and repacked “are the most highly classified, sensitive and compartmented materials recovered during our investigation,” Hur wrote.
Yet the prosecutor let Chung as well as Biden off the hook in also declining to press charges against her, explaining that he found plausible her account that she packed and kept the classified papers “by mistake, ”even though she had prior government experience handling and identifying classified information and was told in a Jan. 3, 2017, National Security Council memo to be sure to remove "only unclassified personal records," and despite providing inconsistent answers to investigators
Hur also went to great lengths to protect her identity in his 388-page report. He refers to her only as “Executive Assistant” and her face is deliberately blurred through pixilation in a photo he published of her sitting in front of a file cabinet in her West Wing office, where she stored Biden’s secret papers.
-
-
@Rainman said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Ya know, this kinda is startin to piss me off. Wasn't there some guy that got nailed and jailed for taking a picture inside one of our nuclear subs?
That’s right.
And, many of the documents that Biden was found to have dated back to his days in the Senate. He had no authorization to have those, so what were they doing there?
And the fact that the special council found no reason to prosecute is the most Comey like thing I’ve seen in about eight years
-
NBC News notices that Biden broke the law:
The controversy over special counsel Robert Hur’s characterization of President Joe Biden’s memory has obscured one of the most surprising findings in his report: evidence that Biden knowingly kept classified materials at home for years and failed to turn them in.
After a yearlong investigation, Hur found that the evidence of “willful retention” — the language in the criminal statute — wasn’t strong enough to justify a prosecution. And he explained in detail why the criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his handling of classified materials include far more serious allegations of misconduct than Biden’s case.
To Democrats, Hur’s finding that there was no criminal case to bring against the president is the most important takeaway.
But to some national security experts, the disclosure that Biden told his ghostwriter that he discovered classified documents in his Virginia home in 2017 — with no indication he returned them — was unexpected and troubling. So was the revelation that Biden disclosed classified information to the ghostwriter on at least three occasions, and that he stored notebooks full of state secrets in unlocked drawers in his home office.
They said a senior government official like Biden should be held to a higher ethical standard than whether a jury would convict him of a felony.
“It may not be criminal, but it’s reckless and awful, because you have no idea what sources and methods you are putting at risk,” said NBC News legal contributor and former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg. “Someone who served as the vice president of the United States should know better.”
-
Haley on 2024 election: 'It will either be me or it will be Kamala Harris'
-
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
-
@George-K said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Visitor logs to Penn Biden center deleted.
Looks like a fairly typical “3 year” visitor log retention policy. “Penn Biden Center” is part of the University of Pennsylvania; and a “3 year” visitor log retention policy does not sound unreasonable for a university. Heck, even a “1 year” or “2 year” retention policy is fine for a university. Why mention “2017”? Because the “Penn Biden Center” nominally opened in 2018; not unreasonable to account for any potential “soft opening” that might have happened in late 2017, and in any event no “visitor logs” would have been established before that anyway.
Somebody has to show how the treatment of that visitor logs is somehow different from UPenn’s typical treatment of visitor logs before this is newsworthy.
-
@Axtremus said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Somebody has to show how the treatment of that visitor logs is somehow different from UPenn’s typical treatment of visitor logs before this is newsworthy.
Somebody has to show why the former Vice-President, who left office before the center opened, had these files in his possession to begin with.
-
@George-K said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
On page 250, he comments on the fact that Biden cooperated and Trump did not. That doesn't change the actual nature of the crime, does it? Obstruction of justice is a separate allegation.
An explanation of the extent of Biden's crimes when it comes to classified documents.
McCarthy: Why Biden Cooperated
But with Biden, there is immense evidence of cooperation. Why? Because his offenses were so serious, long-term, and sprawling.
For decades, Biden hoarded highly sensitive intelligence, including removing it from safekeeping on Capitol Hill, which senators well know they are not allowed to do. Biden, moreover, had many private locations — homes and offices — and irresponsibly spread the mounds of classified documents across them. It’s not like he had a single storage area, and it’s not like he made real efforts to keep his various storage locations secure — to deny access to people who were not authorized to read classified documents. Finally, Biden was so reckless and his offenses were so persistent, that he could not keep track of the classified documents he had retained.
On that last point, Biden apologists make much of the president’s “self-reporting” of his crimes. But he didn’t “self-report.” Instead, a first batch was unexpectedly discovered by private Biden lawyers, who were not authorized to have access to intelligence (certainly not intelligence classified at high levels). Those Biden underlings reported their discovery to the White House, not to the FBI. Biden was hoping to return the batch to government storage at the National Archives and Records Administration. But upon retrieving the documents, NARA officials — again, not Biden or his staff — alerted the National Security Division of the Biden Justice Department. (See Hur Report, pp. 19–20.)
Understand, then, that Biden did not cooperate because he is a well-meaning, law-abiding person. He cooperated because his offenses were so extensive that the FBI needed to search several locations for lots of classified intelligence that he’d willfully retained for decades in violation of federal laws with which he was intimately familiar — laws that, by the time he was found out, he had taken an oath to execute faithfully.
While we should give Biden credit for cooperating, in his case the cooperation should be seen as a measure of the gravity of his offenses, not as a reason to refrain from prosecuting him.
-
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
