The New York Times reported on Friday that President Joe Biden and at least four of his advisers and top lawyers did not actively consider going public with knowledge that classified documents had been found at the then-vice president's office in the Penn Biden Center.
The Times reports that initial discussions, after allegedly stumbling across confidential documents on Nov. 2 — six days before midterms — "were confined to a tight circle including the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president's top personal lawyer, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation."
For the inner circle, there was "no hesitation" in informing the National Archives and Records Administration of the mishandled documents on Nov. 4 — two days after the discovery — but as the Times notes, "the idea of [the inner circle] preemptively making the discoveries public does not seem to have been seriously considered."
"In Mr. Biden's case," The Times reports, "advisers thought that the very act of publicizing the discovery of the documents would create a political furor that would make the appointment of a special counsel unavoidable. They reasoned that the discovery of documents long after leaving office was not that unusual and, as long as there was no intent to violate rules on classified papers, was generally handled without conflict, so the only thing that would create legal exposure would be drawing public attention to it."
According to a video from NowThisNews, on Thursday, while touring storm damage in California, Biden said: "As we found ... a handful of documents were ... filed in the wrong place. We're fully cooperating; looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.
"I think you're going to find there's nothing there. I have no regrets. I'm following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. That's exactly what we're doing. There's no there, there," Biden added.
During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., suggested that the situation was constructed artificially as a means to oust the president or deter him from running in 2024.
"There's an element to this that feels like the Democrats are taking out Joe Biden," Gaetz stated.
"I don't know that that's the case, but I don't know that it's not," he added. "But just as Joe Biden is hardening the cement around his decision to run for president again, they start looking for what classified documents might have been tucked away eight years ago.
"I mean, there's an element of this where it's Joe Biden's lawyer who turns this information over, it's Joe Biden's own Justice Department that's appointed a special counsel to investigate him. Maybe the Democrats have realized that Joe Biden is not useful to them anymore, and they just assume toss him out and get a younger crop of candidates engaged in the next presidential race," he added.
In mid-June, The Times reported that nearly 50 top Democrats feared a Biden reelection campaign would hurt their party's chances at garnering seats in Congress.
After the story broke, Biden, during a goodwill trip to Mexico, said he was "surprised" that documents were found at his old office.
"They did what they should have done," Biden said of his attorneys who handed over the documents. "They immediately called the [National Archives] ... turned them over to the Archives, and I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office. But I don't know what's in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were."
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