Joe Biden and his White House handlers continue to peddle misinformation if not lies about his removal of classified files...
The worst is that Biden - supposedly so unlike Trump - came forward willingly as soon as he realized that he had unlawfully, but inadvertently, removed and possessed classified files. And thus he cooperated fully and promptly with federal authorities.
The truth is far, far different.
Biden removed files improperly both as a Senator and Vice President.
He held some of them in his unlawful possession for perhaps at least 14 years without a word to authorities, dating back at least to his departure from the Senate on January 15, 2009 when he resigned to become Vice President—or if not longer over his some 36-year Senate career.
In fact, in 2017 Biden was fully aware that he had wrongly removed these classified files. As Hur noted, there is a taped conversation on record between Biden and his ghostwriter to just that effect. Biden, at home in Virginia, was recorded as remarking, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs”.
And yet Biden apparently did nothing. He never came forward to any federal authorities for nearly the next five years.
So given that knowledge, why did the attorneys belatedly disclose Biden’s possession of the files on November 2, 2022? Civic virtue? Altruism? Respect for the law?
Hardly.
Otherwise, Biden would have disclosed his unlawful possession at any time during either the intervening prior years when he was a private citizen or during the first 18 months of his presidency, when he knowingly still possessed classified files and still did nothing about it.
In truth, Biden would likely never have come forward, save for one insurmountable problem: Merrick Garland had likely decided to appoint Jack Smith as a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump files that the FBI had swooped into Mar-a-Lago looking for 3 months earlier on August 8, 2022.
In other words, knowing that Smith or a generic special counsel would very quickly be appointed (Smith was sworn in a little over two weeks later, on November 18, 2022), suddenly Biden and Co. preempted that announcement, in fear that Biden had done virtually the same thing as Trump—albeit without presidential declassification power and for at least 14 years in possession of classified files.
Had the attorneys and Biden not come forward, Trump and others would have asked whether Biden had not also removed files. So to get out in front of the formal announcement of the Smith appointment, they preempted, misleadingly and disingenuously, preening that civic virtue had prompted Biden’s “voluntary” disclosures and “cooperation”.
A final note: one of the more disturbing moments in Biden’s catastrophic press conference was his flare up at Hur’s revelation (“How dare he bring up that!”) that in formal interviews an enfeebled Biden had not remembered the general date of his son’s tragic death from a glioblastoma brain tumor on May 30th, 2015 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC.
Biden went on to vent at Hur.
But Hur was simply documenting his analysis that Biden was severely cognitively impaired, and not as VP Kamala Harris claimed, gratuitously smearing Biden.
But who exactly had serially lied about Beau Biden’s demise, by claiming that he had died while on duty in Iraq, serving in the Delaware National Guard as a Judge Advocate?
Joe Biden.
He has still a bad habit of directing attention away from grieving families of fallen soldiers, by claiming that he too experienced the same nightmare.
Biden had been pilloried in the media to cease such false narratives about his son’s tragic premature death due to natural causes back in the United States, years after his deployment in Iraq.
But to no avail, he continues spinning such myths as he did repeatedly as late as last year.
Sadly, doctoring family tragedies for his own purposes is not new to Biden, as Jack Fowler noted in 2019.
The tragic death in a December 1972 traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, and the injuries of his two sons, was raised for decades by Biden—but in a completely false context of blaming an innocent truck driver, Curtis Dunn for the death.
Dunn was innocent of any culpability. No matter, Biden in his serial retelling for years repeatedly smeared Dunn as drunk driver (“an errant driver who stopped to drink”) who had killed his wife and daughter.
Biden finally gave in to the repeated pleas for decades from the truck driver and after his death, his family.
Or as a 2010 Mark Bowden Atlantic essay on Biden noted:
“For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter in December 1972 as drunk, which he apparently was not.
The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge?
The family of the truck driver has labored to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.”
Did he just "mis-remember" then troo?
