FBI Raid at Mar-A-Lago

[Chuck Naill]

Someone needs to tell the spokesperson he is not the president.

[Chuck Naill]

Proximity to classifed documents at Mar-A-Lago,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...documents.html

[TSherbs]

Classified docs found in an old Biden office:

CNN: Classified documents from Biden's time as VP discovered in private office.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/polit...enn/index.html

[Chuck Naill]

I have some questions. Did Mr. Biden know? Why were the attorneys in that office? Was the office sealed? Could they have been put there by someone? That said, this is the way to respond as a professional.

“The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys,” Sauber added. “The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives.”

Maybe Biden could say he thought about declassifying the documents which made them declassified...LOL!!

[dneal]

The best thing about this is that the folks screaming for Trump's head now have to endure their own rhetoric. A nice cozy comforter made of Schadenfreude.

My position remains the same. It's all much ado about nothing. Don't really care which President (or VP, as it were) did it.

[Chip]

Has President Biden claimed the documents are his property?

Did he claim to have declassified them by thinking about it?

Were they kept in high-traffic areas accessible to the (paying) public?

Did his lawyers lie to federal investigators?

[Chuck Naill]

The best thing about this is that the folks screaming for Trump's head now have to endure their own rhetoric. A nice cozy comforter made of Schadenfreude.

My position remains the same. It's all much ado about nothing. Don't really care which President (or VP, as it were) did it.

Not really. Biden didn't claim he didn't have classified documents nor have the National Archives demanded these documents. Also, there is cooperation. Apples and oranges, but still important that classified documents wound up in an unsecured location after 6 years.

She says it better than I can,
"Yesterday, news broke that in November, President Joe Biden’s lawyers found “a small number” of classified documents from his vice-presidential years in a locked closet in Biden’s former office at Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. They immediately contacted the National Archives and Records Administration, which retrieved the documents the same day. Biden said that he did not know the documents were there and that his lawyers “did what they should have done” when they called NARA. Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, John R. Lausch Jr., to see if he should appoint a special counsel.

Trump and his supporters immediately tried to suggest Biden was getting better treatment than he did, but journalist Matthew Miller notes that classified documents often get taken from government facilities by accident. Those errors are reported, the documents recovered, and a damage assessment made to determine whether further action needs to be taken.

In Trump’s case, NARA repeatedly asked him simply to return the documents it knew he had. He refused for a year, then let them recover 15 boxes that included classified documents, withholding others. After a subpoena, his lawyers turned over more documents and signed an affidavit saying that was all of them. But of course it wasn’t: the FBI’s August search of Mar-a-Lago recovered still more classified documents. Trump is being investigated now for obstruction and violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to withhold documents from a government official authorized to take them."

https://heathercoxrichardson.substac...m_medium=email