ohiopressnetwork.com
snip
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.
Biden’s violations of the Espionage Act look worse by the day
Undermining Americans’ safety and security was of little or no concern
Flopping Aces ^ | 02-26-24 | DrJohn
Posted on 2/26/2024, 12:19:56 PM by Starman417
Joe Biden violated the Espionage Act. Of that there is no question. He was not indicted, not for lack of evidence but because the Special Counsel felt he would present himself as a doddering forgetful old man. New information shows just how badly Biden compromised the US.
Yesterday Paul Sperry reported FBI agents caught Joe Biden illegally hoarding a dozen+ notebooks containing classified info, inclg:
— “US intelligence sources, methods & capabilities”
— “Activities of foreign intelligence services”
— “US military programs & capabilities”
— “Foreign military programs”
Exactly the kind of things the Chinese Communist Party would find interesting. These documents were moved to the Penn Biden Center at the U of Pennsylvania by Biden aide Kathy Chung. As usual, Biden refused to accept any responsibility for the handling of those documents:
At a press conference hastily assembled after the report’s release, Biden said he assumed his aides had shipped “all” the documents to the National Archives in College Park, Md. “I wish I had paid more attention to how the documents were being moved and where,” he said. “I thought they were being moved to the Archives. I thought all of it was being moved [there].”
The doddering old man was unconcerned about the handling of highly classified information. Enter the mysterious Kathy Chung
Chung, an old friend of Hunter Biden, began working for Joe Biden in 2012 when he was vice president. She told investigators she oversaw the transfer of the contents of Biden’s file cabinets and desk drawers into 15 boxes when he moved out of the West Wing in January 2017. While other office material did go to the National Archives, Hur rebuked Biden for keeping more than 600 pages of classified information – including military secrets and intelligence sources and methods – in unlocked and unauthorized containers at multiple locations, including a tattered box in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home. The stash included information marked “top secret” involving Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Some of the secrets are compartmented by codewords and can only be stored and read in a secure facility known as a SCIF.
The Biden documents that Chung herself packed, unpacked, and repacked “are the most highly classified, sensitive and compartmented materials recovered during our investigation,” Hur wrote. SC Hur let her off the hook, despite her history of mishandling classified information:
This is not the first time Chung has been found to have mishandled sensitive government documents. In the late 1990s, when she worked with Hunter Biden at the Commerce Department as an administrator, she and her boss Melissa Moss were cited by a federal judge for failing to turn over documents sought in a Freedom of Information Act case, as RealClearInvestigations first reported. They were accused of withholding and even destroying key documents in a search that the judge ruled “grossly inadequate” and “unlawful.”
The documents were moved several times under lax security
The record shows that Chung personally dispersed the sensitive material to at least three locations in the years when Biden was out of office, 2017-2021 – including two temporary office sites before they were “discovered” in 2022 at the Penn “Biden Center” in D.C. in an unlocked office frequented by visitors. They were brought to the Penn Biden Center and stored with virtually no security at all. Anyone was free to access them.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...