Biden’s Document Story
Either the president has been telling another falsehood or the special counsel isn’t doing his job.
James Freeman
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James Freeman
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Sept. 18, 2023 4:49 pm ET
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President Joe Biden arrives on the South lawn of the White House on Sunday after a visit to Wilmington, Del. PHOTO: CHRIS KLEPONIS - POOL VIA CNP/ZUMA PRESS
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting his predecessor Donald Trump over the handling of classified documents. Meanwhile recent press reports suggest that Mr. Biden has been untruthful about a Justice investigation into his own handling of classified materials.
The Journal’s Aruna Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman report:
... special counsel Robert Hur has been negotiating with President Biden’s lawyers for weeks over the contours of an interview with the president, according to people familiar with the matter. Hur was appointed by [Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland] in January to investigate why classified documents ended up at a Washington think-tank office used by Biden after he left the vice presidency, and at his Wilmington, Del., home.
The two sides are still discussing many details of the interview, including what the scope of questions would be, the people said.
On Aug. 25, Steven Nelson reported for the New York Post:
President Biden on Friday denied a report that special counsel Robert Hur is seeking to interview him as part of an investigation into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
“There’s no such request and no such interest,” Biden told reporters after emerging from a Pilates class in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., near where he is vacationing at billionaire Tom Steyer’s lakefront home.
While it’s possible that the discussions reported by the Journal began right after Mr. Biden’s denial, his story doesn’t square with this Aug. 11 report from Monica Alba and Carol Lee of NBC News:
Attorneys for President Joe Biden and the special counsel appointed to investigate his handling of classified documents have been negotiating for about a month over the terms under which he would be interviewed, two people familiar with the matter said.
Discussions between Biden’s lawyers and special counsel Robert Hur’s office are focused on how, when and where the interview might take place, as well as the scope of the questions, these people said. They stressed that the negotiations are ongoing and that no agreement has been reached.
More than three weeks after the president’s denial, NBC hasn’t corrected or retracted its story. While NBC is far from perfect, it’s perhaps sad to say that the network has far more credibility on this issue than our president does.
Mr. Biden maintains that he’s deeply concerned about the appropriate handling of classified information. He claimed to be surprised by last year’s revelations of classified material improperly stored at his home and office. Since at least January the White House has been claiming that the president is “fully cooperating” with the investigation. But of course if all of this were true then by now the investigation might already have been concluded, as in the case of former Vice President Mike Pence. Way back in January this column noted:
Nearly three months after the discovery of classified government documents in Joe Biden’s former private office at the Penn Biden Center, the government maintains that the president is fully cooperating in investigating this matter. Yet as the weeks have turned into months, no one has yet disclosed how classified documents ended up in the Penn Biden office, the Biden home and the Biden garage. This naturally raises the question of who on the Biden staff is not being cooperative.
As for the recent reporting on the investigation, if Mr. Biden really was telling the truth in August when he claimed the special counsel had no interest in interviewing him, then the investigation has even less credibility. What serious investigator wouldn’t want to interview the person who had access to government secrets and on whose property the documents were stashed?
The Journal report of negotiations suggests that Joe Biden’s lawyers have been working long and hard to protect their client from potential legal jeopardy. That’s his right and that’s their job. But this episode underlines that “fully cooperating” is among the Beltway’s most egregious examples of the abuse of language in a town chock full of them.
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Speaking of Biden legal challenges, the president’s son Hunter Biden is suing the Internal Revenue Service and alleging that IRS whistleblowers have violated his privacy in the course of alleging that the government has not appropriately pursued the case against him.
“Mr. Biden has cooperated fully with the IRS investigation,” claims Hunter Biden’s legal filing.
Some may wonder why Hunter Biden is suing the IRS, rather than the whistleblowers who are by definition not acting as spokesmen for the government and are in fact criticizing the government.
Perhaps Hunter Biden is confident that his father’s IRS would never punch back at him with a so-called Rule 11 letter and then a motion to the court to impose sanctions for a frivolous claim.
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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”
