Comer on Biden/Documents Case: 'It Seems Political...Hypocritical...Like a Double Standard'
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President Joe Biden attends a worship service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 2023. (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)(CNSNews.com) - Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said he doesn't yet know whether Joe Biden broke the law by having classified documents in his possession after leaving the Obama administration.
But Comer told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, "I will accuse the Biden administration of not being transparent. Why didn't we hear about this on November 2, when the first batch of classified documents were discovered? Remember, they were quick to call for a special counsel [for Donald Trump] prior to the midterm elections.
"And Joe Biden used as his closing argument during the midterm elections that Republicans were a threat to democracy. And he cited the fact that President Trump mishandled the documents. While he was doing this, he knew very well that he himself had possession of classified documents."
Comer said he's not only concerned about the lack of transparency -- he's also concerned about what he called a "two-tiered system of justice in America."
"It seems political here. It seems hypocritical. It seems like a double standard. And that's our concern."
Comer said he's most frustrated with the National Archives, an agency over which his committee has jurisdiction, "because they have not been transparent at all."
Comer said the Archives never informed the Oversight Committee about "what's going on here" -- the discovery of classified material at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 2, six days before the 2022 election.
"Why was Mar-a-Lago raided, but the president's (Biden's) home not?" Comer asked. "Why are the president's lawyers still allowed to go rummage through, looking for documents, after a special counsel has been appointed?
"It doesn't make sense. It's not fair. We just want equal treatment."
The discovery of classified material in Biden's office at the Biden Penn Center happened on November 2nd, as Biden's lawyers were cleaning out the office, but the public only learned about it last week.
Since then, there has been a steady drip of more documents found; and even more documents found. (See timeline below)
Comer told CNN on Sunday he's concerned that after Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel on January 12, on that same day – hours after the announcement – “we still had the president's personal attorneys, who have no security clearance, still rummaging around the president's residence looking for things,” Comer said.
"I mean, that would essentially be a crime scene, so to speak, after the appointment of a special counsel. So, we have a lot of questions for the National Archives. We have a lot of questions for the Department of Justice. And, hopefully, we will be getting some answers very soon."
Comer said he wants to see the visitor logs to Biden's Wilmington home.
"We want to know who had access to the Biden Center for Diplomacy, because this is the same type of investigation that the Democrats were so outraged and launched and demanded happened to President Trump.
"What we see with President Biden is, there are multiple locations. We would never have known about the possession of the classified documents were it not for investigative reporting by CBS that somehow got a leak to determine that this had happened prior to the election.
"So the administration hasn't been transparent about what's going on with President Biden's possession of classified documents. And we just want equal treatment here with respect to how both former President Trump and current President Biden are being treated with the document issue."
Timeline of discovery and disclosure of classified documents in Biden's possession:
November 2: Biden's attorney find classified documents while cleaning out his office at the Biden Penn Center in Washington, D.C.
November 4: The National Archives Office of Inspector General notified the Department of Justice that documents with classified markings were discovered at the Penn Biden Center.
November 8: Election day in the USA.
November 9: DOJ begins investigation into alleged mishandling of classified information.
Nov. 14: Attorney General Merrick Garland assigns U.S. Attorney John Lausch to decide if a special counsel should be appointed.
December 20: Biden's attorneys find more classified documents in Biden's Wilmington home -- in the garage and library.
January 5: Lausch recommends that Garland appoint a special counsel;
January 9: CBS News breaks the news that classified documents were discovered in Biden's office on Nov. 2 at the think tank funded by University of Pennsylvania.
January 10: Biden, in Mexico City, makes his first comments on the Nov. 2 discovery, saying nothing about the second batch found in his home on Dec. 20.
January 11: Lawyers find one more classified document in Biden's library, in addition to the ones found on Dec. 20.
January 12: AG Merrick Garland announces the appointment of Robert Hur as special counsel
Later on January 12: Biden's lawyers find another five classified documents at his Wilmington home.
January 14: The White House announced the discovery of the additional five documents.
(CNSNews.com) - Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said he doesn't yet know whether Joe Biden broke the law by having classified documents in his possession after leaving the Obama administration.
But Comer told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, "I will accuse the Biden administration of not being transparent. Why didn't we hear about this on November 2, when the first batch of classified documents were discovered? Remember, they were quick to call for a special counsel [for Donald Trump] prior to the midterm elections.
"And Joe Biden used as his closing argument during the midterm elections that Republicans were a threat to democracy. And he cited the fact that President Trump mishandled the documents. While he was doing this, he knew very well that he himself had possession of classified documents."
Comer said he's not only concerned about the lack of transparency -- he's also concerned about what he called a "two-tiered system of justice in America."
"It seems political here. It seems hypocritical. It seems like a double standard. And that's our concern."
Comer said he's most frustrated with the National Archives, an agency over which his committee has jurisdiction, "because they have not been transparent at all."
Comer said the Archives never informed the Oversight Committee about "what's going on here" -- the discovery of classified material at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 2, six days before the 2022 election.
"Why was Mar-a-Lago raided, but the president's (Biden's) home not?" Comer asked. "Why are the president's lawyers still allowed to go rummage through, looking for documents, after a special counsel has been appointed?
"It doesn't make sense. It's not fair. We just want equal treatment."
The discovery of classified material in Biden's office at the Biden Penn Center happened on November 2nd, as Biden's lawyers were cleaning out the office, but the public only learned about it last week.
Since then, there has been a steady drip of more documents found; and even more documents found. (See timeline below)
Comer told CNN on Sunday he's concerned that after Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel on January 12, on that same day – hours after the announcement – “we still had the president's personal attorneys, who have no security clearance, still rummaging around the president's residence looking for things,” Comer said.
"I mean, that would essentially be a crime scene, so to speak, after the appointment of a special counsel. So, we have a lot of questions for the National Archives. We have a lot of questions for the Department of Justice. And, hopefully, we will be getting some answers very soon."
Comer said he wants to see the visitor logs to Biden's Wilmington home.
"We want to know who had access to the Biden Center for Diplomacy, because this is the same type of investigation that the Democrats were so outraged and launched and demanded happened to President Trump.
"What we see with President Biden is, there are multiple locations. We would never have known about the possession of the classified documents were it not for investigative reporting by CBS that somehow got a leak to determine that this had happened prior to the election.
"So the administration hasn't been transparent about what's going on with President Biden's possession of classified documents. And we just want equal treatment here with respect to how both former President Trump and current President Biden are being treated with the document issue."
Timeline of discovery and disclosure of classified documents in Biden's possession:
November 2: Biden's attorney find classified documents while cleaning out his office at the Biden Penn Center in Washington, D.C.
November 4: The National Archives Office of Inspector General notified the Department of Justice that documents with classified markings were discovered at the Penn Biden Center.
November 8: Election day in the USA.
November 9: DOJ begins investigation into alleged mishandling of classified information.
Nov. 14: Attorney General Merrick Garland assigns U.S. Attorney John Lausch to decide if a special counsel should be appointed.
December 20: Biden's attorneys find more classified documents in Biden's Wilmington home -- in the garage and library.
January 5: Lausch recommends that Garland appoint a special counsel;
January 9: CBS News breaks the news that classified documents were discovered in Biden's office on Nov. 2 at the think tank funded by University of Pennsylvania.
January 10: Biden, in Mexico City, makes his first comments on the Nov. 2 discovery, saying nothing about the second batch found in his home on Dec. 20.
January 11: Lawyers find one more classified document in Biden's library, in addition to the ones found on Dec. 20.
January 12: AG Merrick Garland announces the appointment of Robert Hur as special counsel
Later on January 12: Biden's lawyers find another five classified documents at his Wilmington home.
January 14: The White House announced the discovery of the additional five documents.
Biden and the secrets of the national security state
There are many unanswered questions that follow on the news that classified documents have been found in unsecured locations in Washington D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware, where they were taken by aides to then-Vice President Biden at the end of his eight years in office.
But they are not the questions over which Biden’s Republican opponents are howling and the corporate media is obsessing.
The important issues, which the media avoids raising, include the following: What is in these documents? Why are there so many secrets? And who is the US government keeping the secrets from?
Many of the documents that receive the highest classification—Top Secret, or Sensitive Compartmented Information—relate to the foreign policy of the United States. In other words, they concern the abominable crimes being carried out by US imperialism all over the world.
Let us suggest some possible subjects these documents might cover:
The role of the US-allied Saudi government in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, carried out by the Al Qaeda organization founded by the Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. Most of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and several were receiving financial support from the Saudi regime at the time of 9/11.
The US role in the 2014 regime-change operation in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government and installed a far-right, anti-Russian regime, riddled with neo-Nazis, and set the stage for the outbreak of war with Russia in Ukraine eight years later.
What the United States is doing in relation to Taiwan, in an effort to provoke a Chinese invasion, based on the example of Russia and Ukraine, which would become the pretext for an all-out US-led war against the Beijing regime.
US plans for regime-change through economic strangulation, internal subversion and outright war in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and other countries targeted by American imperialism.
Conversely, US plans to intervene to prop up reactionary authoritarian governments like the Saudi monarchy and other Persian Gulf autocracies, the bloodstained Egyptian military dictatorship, the Hindu chauvinist government of Narendra Modi in India and similar governments in Latin America and Africa.
In pursuit of any or all of these goals, plans for CIA assassinations and other covert operations in virtually every country in the world.
President Joe Biden epitomizes the fusion of the state and the individual, to the extent that he hardly knows where one ends and the other begins. He was a senator for 36 years, elected to his first term at the age of only 29. He spent much of that time on the Foreign Relations Committee, either as chairman or ranking minority member, giving him access to many such secret plans. He was then vice president for eight years, with a portfolio that included Latin America and Ukraine.
It is likely that when his eight years in the Obama administration came to an end, he had so many thousands of pages of classified documents in his possession that it was easy for aides to miss a few. A handful of press reports suggest that some of them concern Ukraine and Iran, two of the most sensitive areas of US subversion.
Nor are Top Secret papers limited to foreign policy. It is noteworthy that last month the National Archives released a tranche of documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with significant redactions and with many documents withheld at the request of the intelligence agencies.
In other words, 60 years after the Kennedy assassination, the CIA still refuses to come clean about its ties with the supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who moved to the USSR at the height of the Cold War, married a Russian woman, then returned to the United States and joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a group purportedly opposed to the US blockade that was manipulated by the US intelligence agencies.
As far as the political impact of the revelations is concerned, the Democratic Party is hoist with its own petard. While Trump was in office, it focused its attacks on him on foreign policy, suggesting that he was an agent or stooge of the Putin regime in Russia. After Trump left office, it focused its opposition to Trump on his possession of Top Secret papers at Mar-a-Lago, and Biden himself banged the “damage to national security” drum in an interview with 60 Minutes.
The president’s Republican critics have used the revelations not just to undermine Biden politically, but to foment anti-Chinese sentiment. They hint darkly that Chinese spies could have had access to the unsecured documents and demand detailed visitors’ lists for the Penn Biden Center in Washington, Biden’s home in Wilmington and even his garage.
The hypocrisy here is obvious, since these same warriors for transparency opposed the release of visitors’ logs to the Trump White House, after Trump broke with the longstanding practice of public disclosure.
There is cynicism, hypocrisy and reaction aplenty on both sides, as is characteristic of disputes within the US ruling elite.
But if there is a crime in these stories, it is not the endangering of secrets; it is the existence of them. The real victim of the crime is the American people—and the populations of the world targeted by US imperialism—not Biden, Trump or the massive military-intelligence apparatus.
Biden is the leader of a supposedly democratic government that is buried in secrets, many of which are known to other governments in the world, but are not made known to the American people. As far as the US ruling class is concerned, the American people must be kept in the dark about how US wars are prepared and what the trillion dollars in annual US military-intelligence spending is really buying. They fear that if the American people knew what crimes were being carried out, they would rise up in anger and outrage.
That is why a courageous exposer of secrets like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being held in a British dungeon on a US extradition warrant: his “crime” was to make public evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, records of torture at Guantanamo Bay, diplomatic cables documenting conspiracies to subvert and bully governments around the world, and CIA techniques for hacking and surveillance.
The American corporate media has turned the Biden documents affair into a further justification for suppressing secrets and keeping the American people ignorant of what is being done in their name.
The World Socialist Web Site will not join in this campaign. We base ourselves on the tradition of the Bolshevik Party. When the working class took power in the 1917 October Revolution, one of the first actions of the new government was to publish the secret diplomatic agreements of the Tsarist regime, in which the world was to be carved up among the imperialist powers. That is how the international working class must be defended against the provocations of world imperialism.
quiz - how many sociopath lawyers are hidden in elective office?
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (THREE GAMER LAWYERS) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER). BRIAN C JOONDEPH
There is only one way to say that Biden is innocent, and that is for Obama to announce, “I told Joe he could take the documents.” However, if Obama makes that announcement, he has conceded, and all the Dems will be forced to concede, that a president can declassify documents simply by walking them out of the White House or authorizing someone else to do so.
In other words, to exonerate Biden, Obama must also exonerate Trump from the disgraceful, deeply (criminally?) dishonest charge leveled against Trump. I get a real kick imagining Obama sitting in the lavishly decorated office of one of his three luxury homes, cursing to himself that you can always trust Joe Biden to “F” things up.
Rob Reiner Calls Joe Biden ‘Decent Law Abiding Person’ in Wake of Classified Documents Scandal
Hollywood celebrity Rob Reiner, who vigorously campaigned for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, is now helping to perform damage control for the president in the wake of damaging revelations that Biden kept classified documents from his time as vice president in unsecured locations, including his Delaware car garage next to his prized Corvette.
In a tweet on Sunday, Rob Reiner declared that President Biden is a “decent law abiding person,” comparing him unfavorably to former President Donald Trump, whom he called a “pathologically lying criminal.”
Reiner has yet to directly comment on Biden’s classified documents scandal despite having repeatedly called for Trump’s indictment over classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago . As president, Trump had full authority to declassify documents while Biden as vice president did not.
Reiner’s tweet echoed familiar refrains from the 2020 election when the mainstream media sought to portray Biden as “decent” and “competent.”
As Breitbart News reported, Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned a U.S. attorney to review the classified documents that were found in Biden’s old office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
The president confirmed Thursday another batch of classified documents was discovered in his garage at his Delaware home, next to his Corvette, but stopped short of explaining why.
“By the way, the Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? It’s not like they’re sitting out in the street,” he told reporters.
So far, the Biden administration has failed to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the matter, despite Biden’s promise upon taking office to uphold the highest standards of transparency.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
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