A recent report indicates that Hunter Biden, the son of US President Joe Biden, was the person who had recommended to the then-vice president two of his staffers who he blames for his mishandling of classified materials when he left the White House in January of 2017.
“I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,” the president said when asked if he took responsibility for being careless with classified materials.
According to the report, documents have confirmed that the staffers Biden referenced may include Kathy S. Chung, who had worked with Hunter Biden at the Department of Commerce handling e-commerce policy issues sometime in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s during President Bill Clinton’s presidency. And the other staffer could be Anne Marie Muldoon, nee Person, who worked for him at Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Hunter reportedly got Chung her position in the White House in 2012, a year before he traveled with the vice president on Air Force Two to Beijing to “seal a lucrative investment deal with the Chinese” the report claims. In an email to Chung he described the job as being a “primary gatekeeper for the VP [and the] conduit everyone goes through to get to [Joe Biden]”. Then in mid-2014 he offered a job to Muldoon as Chung’s assistant.
Chung stayed on as an assistant to the former vice president at the Penn Biden Center in DC, where Biden’s classified documents were then discovered by his lawyers. According to Hur, she didn’t notice any classified papers among the records that she had packed and unpacked before she filed them away in cabinets and closets in Biden’s office. Though, she and Muldoon reportedly received an email on January 3, 2017 warning them to not pack any classified documents.
According to a separate report, Chung told associates that she was reportedly “distressed” that she may “inadvertently been involved in moving or storing classified material”.