After reports broke that a batch of classified documents had been found at the home of President Joe Biden when he was still serving as Vice President, the White House is now claiming in a statement that the files were simply “inadvertently misplaced.”
The documents, which were found in Biden’s garage at his Delaware beach house, were the second batch of classified files from the Obama administration found to be in Biden’s personal possession outside of his official White House office. The first cache of classified info was found in a private office he used at UPenn’s Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington - a think tank which, interestingly, had also received about $54.6 million in anonymous Chinese donations from 2014 through June 2019. Documents recovered there reportedly contained classified information pertaining to the U.K., Ukraine, and Iran.
Richard Sauber, Special Counsel to the President, claimed the whole thing is just an honest “mistake" - a story we're apparently supposed to buy without blinking.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon the discovery of this mistake,” he said.
NEW from White House counsel: Classified documents were “inadvertently misplaced” and that it was a “mistake.” pic.twitter.com/0jBX23NAZF
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) January 12, 2023
Oh. OK, then.
Related: University Tied to Biden's Classified Docs Received Over $50 Mil. in Chinese 'Donations,' 'Gifts'
The revelation that Biden - who didn’t have the authority to declassify anything as Vice President - was keeping a batch of classified info somewhere between his toolbox and vintage Corvette makes for a sticky situation, considering Biden’s Department of Justice is currently looking at prosecuting Donald Trump for keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home taken from the White House during his time as the actual President, a state of affairs that apparently necessitated an unannounced raid on Trump’s property and which justified federal agents rifling through Trump's desk drawers and coat closets, and all of which just happened to occur right around the same time congressional Democrats were looking for evidence to indict him on insurrection charges.
But Biden's secret cache of classified stuff, taken by a Vice President who didn't have any authority whatsoever to do so, was just "inadvertently misplaced" next to his recycling bin and some old paint cans, or kept in an office that got millions from unnamed people in China.
Uh huh.