Biden's Classified Memo Saga Shows US Internal Political Crisis is Worsening, Observers Say
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US President Joe Biden’s aides have reportedly found a second batch of classified documents at a new location, according to NBC News. On January 9, White House lawyers revealed that roughly a dozen classified memos from the Obama administration were discovered last November inside the offices of the Penn Biden Center.
"These successive disclosures are very damaging for a president who is weak and heavily criticized even among Democrats, whose majority does not want him to run for a second term," Come Carpentier de Gourdon, the convener of the editorial board of World Affairs, told Sputnik. "Biden's policies are generally unsuccessful and left-wing Democrats feel betrayed by his very traditional economic measures. There is growing fatigue about and opposition to vast financial expenses on Ukraine."
Earlier this month, White House lawyer Richard Sauber told news outlets in a statement that on 2 November 2022, Joe Biden's private lawyers had found a batch of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, where Biden worked between 2017 and 2019. The president's lawyers immediately informed the National Archives and Records Administration about the trove.
The memos in question reportedly originated from the Obama administration, and included intelligence on Ukraine, Iran, and the UK. Still, the discovery wasn't made public before the November midterms, which saw the Democratic Party's defeat in the lower chamber of the US Congress. Attorney General Merrick Garland has reportedly assigned the US attorney in Chicago to review the files. Joe Biden said he was unaware that the classified materials had been kept at the think tank.
Following Sauber's statement, US media reported about yet another cache of classified documents found at a separate location by Biden aides. According to the US press, the classification level, number, and precise location of the additional batch were not immediately clear. It also remains unclear when the files were discovered and whether the search for any other classified materials Biden may have from the Obama administration is complete.
10 January 2023, 12:57 GMT
Classified Docs: Biden and Trump Cases
US conservative outlets immediately drew parallels between Biden's classified memo drama and the fuss over Donald Trump keeping classified documents at his premises in Mar-a-Lago. Last year, Trump voluntarily turned over a number of government files he had stored after leaving the Oval Office. Nonetheless, after that, the FBI carried out a raid on Trump's house on August 8, 2022 and grabbed 13,000 documents from the location. Just 103 of them turned out to be classified and 18 were marked "top secret." The former president, however, maintained that he had declassified the files before he left office. AG Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the case of Trump's classified documents.
The Republicans recently called on Garland to appoint a special counsel for Biden too, after it turned out that the former vice president had kept secret government materials at the Penn Biden Center and other presumably unprotected locations. Some US conservative outlets have raised the alarm over the possibility that foreign spies could have had access to the files withheld by Biden.
"We know that the attorney general, Mr. Garland, has the option of opening a criminal investigation," Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst, founder of AK Consultancy, and former chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Bow Group, told Sputnik. "Nevertheless, I'm quite reluctant whether or not Mr. Garland will choose this nuclear option for the sitting president."
According to Kasonta, Biden was reckless and his case should be criminally investigated. He does not believe that the president knew nothing about the recently discovered classified Obama administration memos.
"[L]egal experts (…) said the documents were found in a locked closet in Biden’s former office, inside three or four boxes along with unclassified documents, which, they claimed, 'suggests routine misplacement.' But this does not explain how the documents got there in the first place," said Sandhya Jain, political analyst and independent researcher, masters in political science from the University of Delhi, India.
"Biden had dubbed the recovery of documents from Donald Trump’s home as 'totally irresponsible,' stating on the 60 Minutes talk show, 'How could anyone be that irresponsible? … what data was in there that would maybe compromise sources and methods?' Now the boot is on the other foot," Jain continued.
She believes that the discovery of documents in Biden’s former office "will certainly impact the probe into Trump’s mishandling of documents."
11 January 2023, 21:17 GMT
Attempts to Shield the Bidens in 2023 May Fail
The timing of the disclosure concerning Biden's classified documents saga speaks volumes, according to the international observers.
"The discovery of these documents, whatever their real importance, could have influenced the midterm vote and favored the Republicans: it will certainly affect the trust that Democratic voters have in the Biden administration," Tiberio Graziani, chairman of Vision and Global Trends International Institute for Global Analyses.
Meanwhile, it appears that the Biden administration's attempts to cover up the issue before the 2022 midterms is strikingly similar to the efforts to suppress the story about Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and his "laptop from hell" ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Elon Musk's Twitter Files recently demonstrated that the US intelligence community arranged nothing short of a "damage control" operation in 2020 to shield the Democratic presidential nominee from the scandal.
"There is evidence of a policy in the US administration to stop or delay the release of any information unfavorable to the President personally and his family," said de Gourdon. "The major security agencies seem to be acting in keeping with that 'damage control' and cover-up process meant to limit bad publicity and loss of public support for the Biden administration. Most Democrat office holders will not turn against their president and will try to minimize the facts by claiming that it is all partisan propaganda from the other side."
However, now that the GOP has taken the House of Representatives, it will be hard for Democrats and their apparent allies in US federal agencies to cover these cases up. De Gourdon expects that "more damaging information will come out about Hunter Biden and his father's association with him for corrupt business deals and influence peddling." In addition to the GOP's ongoing investigations into the Bidens, the Republican lawmakers may also initiate impeachment proceedings against the incumbent president, according to the scholar.
For his part, Graziani believes that the discovery of Biden's documents and emerging bad publicity associated with the case shows that "the US political crisis is worsening."
"The discovery of Biden's classified documents is yet another example of how opaque US political life is," Graziani said. "This discovery seems to usher in a new season of domestic politics that will last until the next presidential elections. It will most likely be a season marked by scandals aimed at further discrediting the images of Trump and Biden himself. In this regard, it will be necessary to monitor and analyze the mainstream communication in order to understand the evolution of the ongoing political conflict and to understand, above all, who the beneficiary is and how it will be."
