Classified documents – third cache

Yesterday afternoon we heard that, on the very day NBC News broke the story of the second cache of classified documents in Joe Biden’s personal possession, Biden’s personal attorney found the first page of what turned out to be a third cache. This highlights more the question of why Biden took them when he could never declassify them. (And also why he retained them while a private citizen.) Already this story bespeaks carelessness of a phenomenal order. But again, why are people revealing it so readily? Unless someone has made the decision to put Biden out to pasture.

Finding the third cache of classified documents

Reportage comes from Just the News and Todd Starnes’ blog. Richard Stauber, who carries the title of Special Counsel to the President, released a statement yesterday about the latest findings. (Stauber is not, of course, the Justice Department Special Counsel now investigating this affair.) Herewith his statement, in full:

President Biden’s personal attorneys have followed a process, coordinated with the Archives and the Department of Justice, to review documents at the Penn Biden Center and the President’s Delaware residences. The President’s personal attorneys conducting the searches do not have active security clearances, so if they identified a document with a classified marking, they stopped and did not review it, and suspended any further search in that box, file or other specific space where the document was found, as appropriate.

Since the DOJ made contact with the President’s personal attorneys, the next step in the process was to notify DOJ and to arrange for DOJ to take possession of the document. This is what occurred in Wilmington on Wednesday when the President’s personal attorneys discovered one document with a classified marking consisting of one page in a room adjacent to the garage. At that point, the President’s personal attorneys stopped searching the immediate area where the document was found.

Six pages altogether

Because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document the President’s personal counsel found on Wednesday to the Justice Department. While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.

The President’s lawyers have acted immediately and voluntarily to provide the Penn Biden documents to the Archives and the Wilmington documents to DOJ. We have now publicly released specific details about the documents identified, how they were identified, and where they were found. The appointment of the Special Counsel in this matter this week means we will now refer specific questions to the Special Counsel’s office moving forward. As I said Thursday, the White House will cooperate with the newly-appointed Special Counsel.

How many caches of classified documents does this make?

We now hear of three caches of classified documents, dating back to Biden’s Vice-Presidential days, still in his possession. Biden’s personal attorneys discovered the first cache on November 2, 2022, and the second on December 20, 2022. In fact, Stauber’s statement shows that this cache turned up while the Attorney General was naming a Special Counsel.

No official has yet speculated on why then-Vice-President Biden took those documents to begin with. We do know that he possessed the first cache for five and three-quarters years, in his private office in Washington. The Attorney General has already said that office was not an authorized depository of classified documents.

Why?

The irreverent cartoonist Ben Garrison seems convinced that Barack Obama has ordered Biden’s aides to “cooperate” as they’re now doing. A recent cartoon by him depicts Obama pushing Biden ahead of him with a giant push broom. He shouts, “Time to go, Joe!” as he pushes the current pResident, together with several loose documents with classified markings. (And an ice-cream cone that Biden has dropped.) Behind Obama and to his left, cackling Kamala Harris manages to shout, “Clean up on Aisle 46!”

Obama would have two reasons for so acting. First, he almost ensures that Biden will not run again in 2024. By this theory, Ambassador Susan Rice, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, has been pulling the strings since Biden took office. Rice works for Obama, so that’s how Obama keeps control. But that kind of control can wear thin. So Obama might have decided it’s time to run his wife Michelle for the Presidency, not Biden.

Obama would have another reason: Joe Biden has blown one gaffe, and/or sniffed one little girls hair, too many. The discoveries of these caches of classified documents do not count. What counts is how Biden has been disgracing himself in public and manifesting, with almost his every public appearance, his senile dementia.

But how long did Obama know?

But these facts raise even more questions. Obama must have known that Biden took those documents out of the White House on his last days. This isn’t a case of someone planting the documents to embarrass Biden at a critical moment. Or if the plant did occur, then it happened almost six years ago. We must assume that Obama knew exactly where those documents were, or as closely as he could know, given Biden’s proclivity to forget what he’s doing while doing it.

Obama also picked a good time to spring his trap – after a new Congress was seated. He might even have deliberately waited for Kevin McCarthy to claim his Speakership – after fifteen votes. In fact, CBS News broke the story of the first cache on the same day the House adopted its Rules.

This classified documents story gives Obama three options:

1. Have Ambassador Rice relegate Biden to the White House residential quarters and, like Edith Wilson, run the affairs of state while occasionally giving Biden documents to sign,
2. Let Kamala Harris gather signatures on a declaration of Presidential inability, or even:
3. Wait for the House to impeach Biden, then instruct his tame Senators to vote to convict. (Or else absent themselves from the Senate to lower the conviction threshold. A majority of Senators constitutes a quorum.)

This drama has likely gone too far to ignore. As to which option Obama (if he is the orchestrator) chooses, everyone will have to wait and see.