Another batch of classified documents has been discovered by President Joe Biden's legal team. The location and scope of this latest trove have yet to be revealed, but the fact that another collection exists suggests the legacy media's defensive play of accidental document removal is straining the bounds of credulity.
After initially refusing to answer questions, the president finally stated that he doesn't "know what's in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were." Making a distinction between ignorance of the facts and former President Trump's alleged "willful malfeasance" has allowed the Fourth Estate to paint a picture of differing motivations – a narrative that begins to fall apart when more than one batch of documents and multiple moves of the offending material comes to light.
A Tepid Official Response
"As my colleagues in the Counsel have stated and said to all of you yesterday, this is an ongoing process under the review of the Department of Justice. So we are going to be limited on what we can say here," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained to reporters.
The DOJ has also been uncommonly tight-lipped on the situation. The US Attorney for Illinois, John Lausch, has filed multiple reports to Merrick Garland; numerous media outlets have averred that the investigation is, therefore, coming to an end. But as new facts come to light, surely they must be considered before the case is closed?
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The president said that the first batch of classified documents was in a locked closet and were, as such, kept securely. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) supported the assertion saying, "There is no comparison [to the Trump documents]. They were in a locked closet. They were not accessible." But largely unreported by the legacy media is that the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement officially opened its doors in 2018, two years after Biden stopped being vice president. So, where were the documents stored during the missing years? And who had control of them for that specific period?
No word, as yet, has been given on where the second collection was found. Notably, according to the White House, Team Biden has been searching for potentially troublesome documents since November. This raises certain questions about how many possible locations such material may have either been stored or passed through.
More Classified Documents to Be Found?
Since 1990, the number of documents deemed classified by federal agencies has increased exponentially, with some estimates suggesting this figure exceeds more than one trillion pages per year. In 2005, The New York Times reported that federal agencies were "classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like 'sensitive security information.'" By 2017, when Biden stopped being VP, this number had only grown.
Joe Biden's two homes, his former offices at the University of Delaware Library, multiple other offices – could any or all of these contain secret troves of sensitive information? To claim ignorance of one batch is concerning but credible. Finding more after a concerted search effort suggests either gross negligence with the nation's secrets or a willful disregard for security measures the president claims to respect.
Pick your poison: Incompetence or neglect. Either way, the claim of simple ignorance is a narrative that no longer holds water.
