Biden ‘executive assistant’ referred to in Hur’s report was Biden’s WH gatekeeper, Kathy Chung.
<>Chung mishandled the classified documents yet she still was not charged.
<>Biden appointed her to a cushy job at the Pentagon as Secy Lloyd Austin’s assistant
<>as Secy Lloyd’s asst, Chung has access to the nation’s most highly sensitive military materials.
In Oct 2017, Chung relocated 15 boxes of WH classified documents
<>placed blocks away into the newly-built U of Penn “Biden Center” in a DC office building,
<>she unpacked Biden’s White House documents – including some marked “top secret” –
<>Chung placed them into a 3-drawer filing cabinet in her outer office
<>Chung’s office adjoined Biden’s office (designed to resemble his old West Wing suite).
<>Other documents were left in boxes stacked in an unlocked storage closet,
<>Chung debunked Biden’s claims they were stored in a “locked closet.”
<>the entire office Biden Center suite was never locked,
<>anybody who got past the lobby security guard had access to the classified files stored there.
ohiopressnetwork.com
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After leaving office, Biden had a continuing interest in the Iran nuclear deal, including defending it against criticism by President Trump, who threatened to pull out of the pact and did so in 2018. In response, Biden prepared speeches and memos with Penn Biden Center staff advocating for the deal. They also developed talking points on the subject for Biden’s meetings with Israeli leaders at the center. Holding on to the Iran intelligence and notes would have helped Biden formulate such arguments and been useful source material for his memoir.
As the guardian of his files, Chung helped Biden research the book, “Promise Me, Dad.” It’s not known if Biden or Chung referenced any of the materials from the boxes in the original manuscript of his book, which was published in November 2017 and revealed insider accounts of Biden’s various roles in U.S. foreign policy, including Ukraine. It also mentioned the Iran nuclear deal, but did not go into detail about the negotiations. Biden listed Chung first among people he acknowledged for their contributions: “Thank you for all of this, and more, to Kathy Chung.”
Chung also worked with Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. In February 2017, about a month after Biden left office, Hur said Biden discussed a classified memo on Afghanistan with Zwonitzer while they met at his McLean, Va., rental home. Zwonitzer taped their conversation, and though he deleted his recordings after learning a special prosecutor had been appointed to investigate Biden’s classified docs scandal, Hur was able to get FBI computer-forensics experts to restore the audio. (Hur declined to prosecute Zwonitzer because he said he couldn’t be sure he was trying to obstruct his investigation.) On the tapes, Biden can be heard saying he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Downstairs from where they met was Biden’s office, where he stored his papers.
Hur believes Biden was referring to the same marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan that FBI agents found in 2022 in his Delaware garage. (He moved the files he kept in his private office in McLean to Wilmington in 2019.) Biden last week denied sharing any classified intelligence with his ghostwriter, and he asserted he has no idea how the classified papers on Afghanistan military strategy and troops wound up in a box in his garage.
Also part of Biden’s book team was Biden’s personal lawyer Bob Bauer, who brokered the contract with the publisher Flatiron Books, an imprint of MacMillan Publishers. Bauer happened to be one of the lawyers who tried to ship Biden’s Penn Biden stash of documents to his home in Wilmington and to a law office in Boston just a few months before the Justice Department raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate looking for classified documents.
In effect, Hur exonerated Chung and Biden over the highly classified documents that were stashed in closets, credenzas, and cabinets at the Penn Biden Center. He concluded that the boxes of secret White House papers simply ended up there “by mistake.”
“The evidence suggests that the marked classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center were sent and kept there by mistake,” he concluded in his report. “Therefore, we decline any criminal charges related to those documents.”
The Department of Justice gave former President Trump and his aides no such benefit of the doubt concerning the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump for “willful retention of classified documents,” among other alleged crimes. He also charged two Mar-a-Lago employees with conspiracy to conceal classified records and obstruction of justice.
Trump is expected to file a motion to dismiss the DOJ’s case against him, arguing “selective prosecution” based on DOJ declining to indict Biden over similar allegations. His lawyers have until Feb. 18 to file such pretrial motions.
Originally published on api.realclear.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.