OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Investigative reporter Paul Sperry revealed in a social media post on Monday that a “rumor” circulating in Washington, D.C., is suggestive of who may have been responsible for the news that President Joe Biden retained a collection of classified documents, perhaps illegally, after he left office as then-President Barack Obama’s VP.
Sperry wrote on Twitter: “NEW: Speculation growing on Hill that US Attorney David C. Weiss, the Delaware prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, may have pressured the sudden ‘discovery’ of Biden’s private, far-flung stash of classified White House materials.”
Sperry, a long-time reporter for RealClearInvestigations, served for a number of years as the Washington bureau chief for Investors Business Daily. It should be noted that no evidence thus far has surfaced to support the rumor relayed by Sperry.
The New York Times reported last week:
David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, is closing in on a decision about whether to prosecute Hunter Biden on charges stemming from his behavior during his most troubled years. Investigators have pored over documents related to and questioned witnesses about his overseas business dealings. They include his role on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company led by an oligarch who at the time was under investigation for corruption — a position that Hunter accepted while his father, as vice president, was overseeing Obama administration policy in Ukraine. Investigators have similarly sought information about interactions between Hunter Biden’s business associates and his father.
“Mr. Weiss is also said to be considering charging Hunter Biden, who has openly acknowledged his years of struggle with drugs and alcohol, with lying on a U.S. government form that he filled out to purchase a handgun in 2018. On the form, he answered that he was not using drugs — an assertion that prosecutors might be able to challenge based on his erratic behavior and possible witness accounts of his drug use around that period,” the Times noted further.
Weiss was appointed in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump.
That said, in all, three separate batches of classified documents have been found in Biden’s possession — two at one of his Delaware homes, and the initial batch last November, ahead of the midterm elections, at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., where the president had a private office.
White House counsel Richard Sauber issued a statement on the matter on Saturday.
“President Biden’s personal attorneys have followed a process, coordinated with the Archives and the Department of Justice, to review documents at the Penn Biden Center and the President’s Delaware residences,” Sauber noted.
“The President’s personal attorneys conducting the searches do not have active security clearances, so if they identified a document with a classified marking, they stopped and did not review it, and suspended any further search in that box, file or other specific space where the document was found, as appropriate,” he added.
“Since the DOJ made contact with the President’s personal attorneys, the next step in the process was to notify DOJ and to arrange for DOJ to take possession of the document. This is what occurred in Wilmington on Wednesday when the President’s personal attorneys discovered one document with a classified marking consisting of one page in a room adjacent to the garage. At that point, the President’s personal attorneys stopped searching the immediate area where the document was found,” the White House counsel continued.
“Because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document the President’s personal counsel found on Wednesday to the Justice Department. While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them,” he said.
“The President’s lawyers have acted immediately and voluntarily to provide the Penn Biden documents to the Archives and the Wilmington documents to DOJ. We have now publicly released specific details about the documents identified, how they were identified, and where they were found. The appointment of the Special Counsel in this matter this week means we will now refer specific questions to the Special Counsel’s office moving forward. As I said Thursday, the White House will cooperate with the newly-appointed Special Counsel,” Sauber concluded.
