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Well. Now we know Joe Biden has been taking classified materials home since his Senate days, some 15 years ago—perhaps longer. Note what Ted Cruz says. How is it possible Joe just walked out with materials, the possession of which would—and does–put mere mortals in prison? Simple: he needed it to trade intelligence for money to corrupt and/or hostile foreign regimes.  Hunter was his bag man. Go here to see Andrea Widberg’s take on the issue. But we need not worry, because AG Merrick Garland is on the job and is strictly ethical and non-partisan:

‘We do not have different rules for Democrats or Republicans, different rules for the powerful or the powerless, different rules for the rich and for the poor, we apply the facts, and the law in each case in a neutral, non-partisan manner,’ Garland alleged to reporters during a press availability at Justice Department headquarters. ‘That is what we always do.’

Ah! So that’s why the FBI raided Trump’s home, publicized it, serially leaked, and didn’t allow any of Trump’s lawyers to accompany them as they searched Melania’s underwear drawers. And that’s why the DOJ conspired with the White House to hide the discovery of classified materials in Biden’s possession, let his lawyers do the searching, and when the DOJ and FBI were finally so embarrassed by multiple revelations they were roused to do a little of their own investigation, let Biden’s lawyers supervise the search. That is what they always do. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Enter “classified” into the SMM home page search bar to find every article in this series. Let’s take a minute to catch up. New felonious revelations seem to crop up daily:

The NY Times reports:

Investigators for the Department of Justice on Friday seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Del., after conducting a 13-hour search of the home, the president’s personal lawyer said Saturday evening.

The remarkable search of a sitting president’s home by federal agents — at the invitation of Mr. Biden’s lawyers — dramatically escalated the legal and political situation for the president, who has insisted that the previous discovery of classified material at his home and former office would eventually be deemed inconsequential.

‘There is no there, there,’ Mr. Biden told reporters on Thursday evening during a trip to California.

If he’s describing the contents of his brain, he’s right.

But during Friday’s search, six more items with classified markings — including some documents from his time as a senator and others from his time as vice president — were taken by investigators, along with surrounding materials, according to the statement from Bob Bauer, Mr. Biden’s attorney.

The new narrative is Biden’s lawyers asked the FBI to search the house. If so, why now? Why not from the beginning? And why would the FBI, supposedly the primary agency responsible for national security, wait for an invitation when they knew for months Biden had classified documents? Did they forget how to obtain search warrants? Oh, and why did the FBI allow the lawyers to look over their shoulders when they did just the opposite when they raided Trump? Oh, but it was a “consensual” search:

Justice Department officials had previously stated that the 13-hour search of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home was ‘consensual,’ but it was unclear which party had initiated it. It now appears that the White House requested the search of its own accord, NBC News reported, citing White House sources.

Why “consensual?” They haven’t yet abandoned the “Biden is fully cooperating and ‘self-reporting’ the evidence of his felonies” narrative. This is interesting:

What does “six more items” mean? Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist wonders too:

Here’s the important distinction:

Any bets, gentle readers, on whether we’ll ever find out how many classified documents Biden has, or their contents? Will we ever learn how much damage to national security Biden has done?  Didn’t think so. Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker, comments:

‘Six items consisting of documents with classification markings’ is deceptively vague, and I would argue misleading language. What exactly are the ‘items’? Are they Bankers Boxes full of hundreds of documents? They could be. We don’t know, and so far, the DOJ has said nothing to the public to enlighten us.

This is the opposite of the ‘transparency’ upon which the kid glove treatment afforded to Biden, compared to the dawn FBI raid imposed upon Trump with his attorneys kept away from the searchers, is based.

But Joe said his would be the most transparent, ethical administration ever!

We are being played. The only question – and it is barely a question at this point – is whether the DOJ also is being played. The fact that it has not clarified the misleading ‘items’ language suggests that it is a willing participant in the political effort to minimize damage to Biden.

No, the DOJ isn’t being played. They agreed to hide the discovery of the first documents. They’re co-conspirators in Biden’s crimes. But Joe is cooperating, he’s “self reporting!” Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, at The Hill, comments:

To ‘self-report’ a crime, a person needs to report it to law enforcement authorities. Biden and his aides absolutely did not do that. Moreover, a close look at the timeline elucidates that the White House hoped this issue would slip quietly into a black hole, with no publicity and no criminal investigation.

On Nov. 2, 2022, the first batch of classified documents — some of which were marked ‘TS/SCI’ (i.e., top secret, sensitive compartmented information), the classification level applied to the government’s most sensitive intelligence — were found by Biden’s private lawyers at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in an office the president used as a private citizen after his term as Obama administration vice president ended.

This was indicative of several felony offenses of federal law. First, the Penn Biden Center did not open until February 2018. Biden obviously took the documents when he left the Obama White House in January 2017, so they had to have been illegally retained at some other unauthorized location for 13 months — meaning they had to have been illegally transported at least twice. Second, Biden directed his Penn Biden Center office to be packed up by his private lawyers, who did not have security clearances (and by the way, even if they had them, that would not necessarily mean they’d be authorized to review TS/SCI documents). Causing national defense information to be exposed to unauthorized persons is also a crime.

What happened next is critical: The Biden private attorney who took the lead on the first batch of documents is Patrick Moore. Moore did not report his discovery of highly classified documents retained in an unlawful place to law-enforcement — i.e., to the FBI or the Department of Justice (DOJ). He reported them to the Biden White House.

As always, gentle readers, take the links to read everything. The invaluable Miranda Devine of The New York Post has a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive. She wrote a book about it, and discovered something deadly incriminating:

One striking email during this period stands out. It was from Hunter to Archer on April 13, 2014, a week before Joe Biden visited Ukraine to meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and refers to ‘my guys upcoming travels.’

For Hunter, it was an uncharacteristically lengthy email, listing 22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign,’ which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk.

‘The strategic value is to create a land bridge for RU to Crimea. That won’t directly affect Burisma holdings but it will limit future UK exploration and utilization of offshore opportunities in particular,’ Hunter wrote.

“RU” is a State Department abbreviation for Russia.

‘It will also result in further destabilization of UK nationally and for whatever govt is in power. And the US will respond with even stronger sanctions. Those sanctions will threaten the tenuous support of the EU which does not have the political will to incur steep energy price increases.’

In point 22, Hunter instructed Archer to buy a ‘burner phone,’ presumably to keep their conversations private. ‘Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.’

It’s a prescient and very well-informed email, unlike anything else Hunter wrote in the nine years covered in the laptop, and it has the distinct flavor of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.

The significance, gentle readers, is everything else Hunter wrote on that laptop is ungrammatical, clumsy, misspelled even childish. It’s mostly high school text-speak.  During those days, he was an addict, and had only shortly before been kicked out of the Navy for cocaine use. He couldn’t stay straight long enough to pass a scheduled drug test to keep a job Joe pulled innumerable strings to get him.

I’ve seen many of Hunter’s writings from that laptop. English teachers quickly learn to recognize variances in their student’s writing style. I used to joke with my students I didn’t even have to read a paper to know it was plagiarized. I merely had to sniff it. It didn’t take long before many of them believed me.

The e-mail to which Devine refers was certainly not written by Hunter. It has the terminology, prose and style of something from the State Department or another federal agency, something classified. Considering the timing, that’s the kind of information Ukraine would be glad to have, and glad to pay for.  But shouldn’t the FBI be aware of this?  After all, they’ve had the laptop for years.  Of course they should, unless they’re emulating Sgt. Schultz: they know nothing, nothing!

Bruce Golding at the New York Post has this:

This can’t really be where Joe Biden kept classified documents he took from the White House — or can it?

A box labeled ‘Important Doc’s + Photos’ was left unsealed on a table ahead of a child’s birthday party in the Delaware home where the 80-year-old president has been discovered to have stashed sensitive government records, a photo from his son’s laptop, discovered by The Post Friday reveals.

Another image on the infamous laptop reveals that Hunter Biden apparently made more than 160 trips to the sprawling, lakeside house in just 52 days during the same time he was involved in controversial business dealings with a Chinese energy conglomerate — and while the home contained the discovered classified documents.

What a coincidence. As usual, the Daily Mail does the reporting the American media won’t touch:

The woman who oversaw the packing and shipping of Biden’s documents in 2017 was former administrative assistant Kathy Chung, who secured the position with a well-placed recommendation from Hunter Biden, who touted her capabilities to his father.

‘Hunter Biden recommended it. They had worked together at Department of Commerce years ago,’ the person said. Hunter notified her of the opportunity, asked her if she was interested, and found out that she was.

‘He spoke to her father about her,’ said the person. So did former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden associate who is among the trio of Democratic senators she had worked for in the past.

The Mail notes there is no current evidence Chung knew what she was packing. Of course she didn’t. This too may be nothing more than a coincidence, but isn’t it delightfully coincidental how often Chinese names crop up in this matter?  Do I know Chung is involved in anything nefarious.  No.  I’m just observing a chain of coincidences.  Another coincidence is the announced departure of Biden’s chief handler, Chief of Staff Ron Klain:

And who is replacing Klain?  Why, Jeff Zeints, who was Biden’s Covid honcho. He did so well lying to America, he’s the perfect pick to run Biden. He has loads of experience as a D/S/C bureaucrat.  And just when you thought this debacle could not be any more debacle-ish:

CNN reported that Mike Pence’s lawyer found classified documents in the former vice president’s Indiana home:

The FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division have launched a review of the documents and how they ended up in Pence’s house in Indiana.

The classified documents were discovered at Pence’s new home in Carmel, Indiana, by a lawyer for Pence in the wake of the revelations about classified material discovered in President Joe Biden’s private office and residence, the sources said. The discovery comes after Pence has repeatedly said he did not have any classified documents in his possession.

It is not yet clear what the documents are related to or their level of sensitivity or classification. Pence’s team plans to notify Congress on Tuesday.

Pence asked his lawyer to conduct the search of his home out of an abundance of caution, and the attorney began going through four boxes stored at Pence’s house last week, finding a small number of documents with classified markings, the sources said.

‘Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,’ wrote Greg Jacob, Pence’s designated representative to the National Archive.

Final Thoughts: Pence has been recently and repeatedly saying, loudly and clearly, he had no classified documents, no sir!  So why did he have a lawyer search his house and not the FBI? Why now if he was so certain?  Couldn’t he be consensual with the feds too? Considering Pence’s reputation for ethical probity, it’s possible he ordered the search just to be certain, because classified documents just sort of walk out without anyone knowing about it, you know.   But it’s also possible he, as a member in good standing of the uniparty, and a man considering a 2024 run for the presidency, was approached and convinced to provide cover for Joe Biden.

But wouldn’t that also provide cover for Trump? Of course—in a nation under the rule of law rather than a two and more-tiered system of justice. Cover for Biden, certainly. Trump is being judged by an entirely different standard: the “get Trump and screw the rule of law” standard.

A little discussed factor is just how people, clearly including senators, are able to waltz off with classified documents? As Senator Cruz noted, when he has had access to classified materials, it has been exclusively in a SCIF, where he read them, and left them there in the custody of people detailed for that purpose.  Even if presidents and vice presidents get to view documents in their offices, isn’t anyone keeping track?  Or are they on the library system, and can check out and return classified documents at will, or not?   Why are we making it so easy for our enemies, or is that the point?  It’s easy, though accurate to observe that if our “leaders” were actively trying to destroy America, they’d be doing nothing different.  It appears that observation extends to the handling our of nation’s secrets as well.

What’s becoming more and more clear is this particular scandal is about the Biden Crime family’s use of classified material to make money. One need not be a crack criminal investigator to see where the evidence trail is leading. Will the DOJ/FBI actually do their jobs and determine if, and to what degree, the Bidens have damaged our national security? Aren’t they interested in seeing if the POTUS is compromised by our enemies? Wouldn’t that be kind of a “big fucking deal” as Joe once quipped to Barack? Or are they far more interested in destroying the country, Donald Trump and anyone who ever so much as thought of voting for him? At the moment, I wouldn’t bet on investigating breaches of national security.

Much more, I’m sure, in the near future.