Classified files found at President's former office...
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Indicting Trump Just Got More Politically Difficult for the DOJ
"Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” That notorious assessment by former president Barack Obama of his vice president’s proclivities is undoubtedly getting a workout at the Biden Justice Department these days.
It turns out that around Thanksgiving, President Biden’s lawyers were constrained to report that he had mishandled classified documents, not only transporting them to but also maintaining them in an unauthorized location. This raises the specter of criminal violations of the federal laws governing the protection of secret government intelligence.
And it’s a double whammy. The unauthorized place where the classified documents were found is none other than the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. This is not just any portentous-sounding monument-to-self erected as a sort of longevity-in-government award for a career mediocrity. It is a facility the Ivy League school established only after raking in a whopping $54.6 million in donations from China. That funding bonanza started in 2014, when Biden was Obama’s veep, and when his bagman son, Hunter, was ensconced in megabucks business with pillars of the communist regime — relationships cemented in Beijing when Hunter hitched a ride on Air Force Two with Pop, who was ostensibly there to steer the Obama administration’s China policy. At the time, Xi Jinping’s regime somehow happened to see the good sense in paying the Biden family gobs of money through the ne’er-do-well Hunter, who had just been quietly booted from the U.S. Navy over his cocaine addiction.
Let’s be clear: Despite Donald Trump’s inevitable inability to contain his glee over the good fortune this Biden misadventure represents for him, what Biden appears to have done — based on the little we know at this early stage — pales in comparison to Trump’s classified-information transgressions.
Biden seems to have self-reported the unauthorized retention of about ten documents with classified markings on them (at this point, we have no idea how sensitive they are), and he is said to be cooperating completely with the government officials who are looking into the matter. By contrast, Trump willfully retained hundreds of classified documents (some at the highest security levels, meaning their falling into the wrong hands could be catastrophic); he fought government efforts to retrieve those documents for over a year and a half; and he not only flouted a grand-jury investigation into the matter but caused his representative to make a sworn statement to the grand jury falsely representing that a package presented to the FBI in June 2022 contained all documents bearing classification markings that had been located in his Mar-a-Lago estate after a painstaking search. Nor is that all. Trump is not just suspected, even after the August Mar-a-Lago search warrant, of continuing to hoard — or of having carelessly lost — classified intelligence; he is known to have held onto classified intelligence after the August search: His lawyers reported finding more documents in November.
That said, the challenge of prosecuting Trump in this matter has never been legal. I’ve intuited that the Justice Department is confident it already has a slam-dunk case and is just waiting for the right to time to launch — i.e., that the prosecution is a matter of when, not if. No, the challenge here for the DOJ is political.
Long before the latest Biden revelation, Trump’s best shot at not being charged was the Hillary Clinton precedent. Clinton’s misconduct was far more comparable to Trump’s than Biden’s appears to be. As secretary of state, she willfully — and against regulations that not only applied to her but that she was enforcing against others — set up a home-brew email-server system in order to defeat government record-keeping requirements (which would otherwise have shown, for example, how much intermingling there was between State Department and Clinton Foundation business). Because dealing with sensitive foreign-relations, military, and national-security matters made up the lion’s share of her job, it was inevitable that classified information and discussions alluding to defense matters were going to be transmitted over and stored on her nonsecure system. And the scheme went on for years, even implicating President Obama in reckless communications of highly sensitive matters via the unprotected facilities. The FBI internally acknowledged that Clinton’s home-brew system could easily have been, and likely was, penetrated by hostile foreign intelligence services.
When the scheme was discovered, Clinton intentionally destroyed tens of thousands of emails, even though she knew full well that they were pertinent to investigations (including Congress’s Benghazi probe) and contained government records (not merely, as she ludicrously claimed, yoga routines and correspondence about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding) that federal law required her to preserve. (It is worth noting here that the Justice Department is contemplating charging Trump with exactly the kind of misconduct on which Clinton got a pass: the unlawful retention of government records, regardless of whether they were classified.)
Clinton was not accused of impeding a grand-jury investigation, but that is only because, under circumstances in which Obama let it be known that he did not want Clinton charged, the Obama–Biden Justice Department colluded with Clinton’s lawyers to limit the FBI’s access to key evidence. The fix was in: The FBI’s top brass began writing up a statement recommending against charges months before the non-prosecution decision was formally made. Even Clinton’s preposterous statements in her perfunctory FBI interview — at which the FBI allowed her accomplices to sit in as her lawyers — were not going to change the administration’s determination not to indict. In order to reach that determination, moreover, the Obama–Biden Justice Department and the FBI effectively rewrote the Espionage Act to require proof of an intent to harm the United States, when the plain text of the statute allows government officials to be prosecuted for gross negligence even absent any such intent.
Because Clinton was not prosecuted, the Justice Department has had only the thinnest margin of error in the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Biden wants to be reelected in 2024. He knows that among the issues most apt to damage him in the 2024 campaign is the partisan weaponization of federal law enforcement — the perception that, for roughly similar conduct, Democrats are given a pass while Republicans have the book thrown at them. That is why his attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel to handle the DOJ’s investigations of Trump; the administration wants to put as much distance as it can between the president and any decision to charge the former president who is running against him. -
Personally I think that's a bad read.
So far it seems like the cases are vastly different. Shuold the gap close, which seems unlikely, I think the pressure would go the other way. (i.e. more pressure to appoint a special prosecutor for Biden)
It’s always something.
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@jon-nyc said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
cases are vastly different.
Differences I see include the fact that Biden's staff turned them over almost immediately after discovering them. That's vastly different, to be sure.
OTOH, what were they doing there to begin with? Biden claims he has no knowledge of how that happened. The buck stops elsewhere, I guess.
Also, they've been there for years. How does that happen? Did he or his staff move them when he was VP?
Politically, the cases are different, but from a legal standpoint, the mishandling of government documents, I'd say they're pretty close.
"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.
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“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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@George-K said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Politically, the cases are different, but from a legal standpoint, the mishandling of government documents, I'd say they're pretty close.
Your framing seems a little bit “just so”.
Why not “from a legal standpoint, the Obstruction of Justice and lying to the feds, I’d say they’re pretty different.”
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@George-K said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
Biden's staff turned them over almost immediately after discovering them
Because they knew it didn't matter, the documents would be kept quiet until after the mid-terms.
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lol
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They also didn’t even investigate until they had evidence of obstruction and failure to cooperate.
That seems like the difference that will persist.
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But wait! There's MORE
Aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Since November, after the discovery of documents with classified markings in his former office, Biden aides have been searching for any additional classified materials that might be in other locations he used, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the ongoing inquiry.
The White House did not return a request for comment. The Justice Department had no comment.
The initial discovery of classified documents in an office used by Biden after his vice presidency was first reported on Monday by CBS News.
The classification level, number and precise location of the additional documents was not immediately clear. It also was not immediately clear when the additional documents were discovered and if the search for any other classified materials Biden may have from the Obama administration is complete.
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Now three locations: also in the garage adjacent to the house.
Meanwhile AG Garland has appointed a special counsel:
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of classified documents found at a former office and the Delaware home of President Biden — ratcheting up the high stakes and potential consequences surrounding national security cases that have now ensnared both the current president and his predecessor.
Garland made the announcement Thursday at the Justice Department, tapping Robert K. Hur, a former U.S. Attorney in Maryland who also served as a senior Justice Department official during the Trump administration.
It is the second time in two months Garland has named a special counsel to investigate the handling of classified materials found in the home and office of a current or former commander-in-chief. In November, he assigned veteran federal prosecutor Jack Smith to oversee day-to-day operations of the criminal probe of former president Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House; Smith is also managing aspects of the Justice Dept.’s investigation of the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that are most closely linked to Trump.
A special counsel has more independence from Justice Department leaders than other federal prosecutors, but still ultimately answers to the attorney general.
The Biden documents special counsel will examine the discovery of at least two sets of classified material. About 10 documents from Biden’s time as vice president were found Nov. 2 at the Washington-based Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, an institute in Biden started after leaving the vice presidency in 2017.Remember, "intent" is a sufficient reason to dismiss all this falderol.
"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.
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It is difficult to believe that executives pull their own files to be taken off site. I’m wondering if both these events were precipitated by staffers without the skills to determine what could and could not be taken. It may be that all predecessors had similar lots, we just did not have as many vultures waiting to swoop,
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Maybe this helps steer him away from running again (fantasy) or at least provides impetus for others to primary him.
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@Mik said in Classified files found at President's former office...:
It may be that all predecessors had similar lots, we just did not have as many vultures waiting to swoop,
That's the current deflection. How can anyone be so irresponsible, so careless?
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"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.
