Maybe it was fake and the mods pulled it? Maybe it’s just obscure. Did you try reverse image search on the pic?
No. I don’t know how to reverse image stuff. I just typed the name of the article in. Tried various other titles with the author’s name, and the defense guys name.
He was in the army a long time. Really wants to make sure there is no extremists in there. Had some incident involving skin heads early in his career that made a big impression-blah blah blah.
Tineye found the picture with this article. The blurb under the picture is the same. The article is different.
Then took the url from the photo in the seattletimes article and ran it through tineye.
Tineye found 54 hits with the earliest as 12/09/2020.
Some of the articles are gone.
Tineye - nice tool: https://tineye.com
photo url I used = https://static.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/urn-publicid-ap-org-0dbbabcdebb2af1dc95d4ce199d6b1faBiden_56077-1024x683.jpg
