KIRO NEWSRADIO OPINION

Ross: Classified documents found in Biden’s office sounds familiar

Jan 10, 2023, 7:57 AM | Updated: 10:01 am

President Biden – who was critical of Donald Trump for spiriting classified documents to Mar-a-Lago – now has his own document problem: classified documents found at an office he occupied about a mile from the White House while he was between jobs.

He was running a University of Pennsylvania think-tank called the Penn-Biden Center.


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“The White House counsel said that Nov. 2 of last year, before the midterm elections, lawyers for President Biden were cleaning out office space at the center when they discovered the documents marked classified in a locked closet they stopped the work and contacted the White House,” the CBS report said.

CBS’s Adrianna Diaz reports that those White House lawyers contacted the National Archives, which contacted the Department of Justice, where the Attorney General directed a US Attorney (appointed by Donald Trump) to determine what was in the documents and how they got to Biden’s office.

It turns out the FBI has also been investigating the sequence of events.

And for Republicans, this is sweet revenge.

Republican representative Byron Donalds of Florida was on CNN – he wants to know why this seems to have been covered up.

“Joe Biden left the vice presidency in 2017. So it’s taken six years for these documents to surface. That is incredibly concerning,” Donalds said.

And he wants the media to give this story the same attention it gave Mar-a-Lago.

“I want to see if we’re going to continue to follow this story as much as we did the documents at Mar-A-Lago. I think that’s only fair,” Donalds said.

Of course, the reason the media followed the Mar-A-Lago story was that it’s illegal for private citizens to have classified documents, which is why Wolf Blitzer asked if what Trump did was illegal.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all because the President and his team have gone back and forth with the National Archives, saying he has the ability to declassify,” Donalds responded. “That is something that’s going to take care of itself at a later date in its own time, in its own space. My question is very clear, why were these documents found six years later?”

And that’s where I had to press pause.

He’s sticking with this argument that Trump had the power to declassify documents just by mentally declassifying them as he took them.

That would mean that Joe Biden, as the current president, would also have that power. He could do that right now! Concentrate really hard, and poof! Declassified!

But better than that, as president, he could fill out the actual paperwork and even do it legally.

But I am guessing he will not do that. I am guessing he will cooperate fully.

That he will not move records around, that he will let the FBI interview him, heck, I bet just for spite, he invites them to search his home, hook him up to a polygraph, and do a brain scan and take a DNA sample.

My guess is he will use this as a chance to demonstrate how an innocent person behaves. And, yes, I know what some of you are thinking: How low can that man go? But that’s politics.

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Ross: Classified documents found in Biden’s office sounds familiar