When House Democrats were attempting in 2019 to impeach then-President Donald Trump, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley was one of the most influential voices to take Trump’s side.
Turley minced no words then, blasting Democrats for the painfully partisan exercise they were putting the president and the country through for obvious political reasons.
Now, with President Joe Biden’s various scandals percolating in Washington, Turley sees much more at stake for the White House, thanks to GOP Rep. James Comer and the work of his House Oversight Committee.
Last week, as the New York Post reported, the oversight committee released a timeline of events surrounding the investigation of classified documents found in Biden offices and in his home where they had absolutely no reason to be.
And the timeline blasted enough holes in Biden’s defense story to sink a battleship.
In the official story, as presented by the White House, the documents stemming from Biden’s days as vice president during the Obama administration first turned up in offices Biden had with the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington.
While the supposedly accidental discovery of documents took place in November, when the Biden team notified the National Archives, they were not reported to the American public until CBS broke the story in January. (The Biden White House that had been attacking Trump for classified documents still in his possession clearly didn’t want Americans making the obvious comparison.)
More documents were later “discovered” at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, with yet another batch supposedly turning up later at Biden’s home.
But Comer’s committee has a new version of events, arguing in a letter released Wednesday addressed to White House Counsel Edward Siskel that Biden’s team knew about a cache of documents from Biden’s presidential years that was at the Penn Center as early as March 2021 (two months after Biden’s inauguration).
🚨 BREAKING 🚨
We have discovered new information about the number of White House employees involved in President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
President Biden’s attorney stated that the discovery of classified documents at Penn Biden Center occurred on November… pic.twitter.com/rLN1VJyRKC
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) October 11, 2023
Between May and October of 2022, according to the timeline, numerous White House staffers — including then-White House Counsel Dana Remus — inventoried the documents, packed them up, and even took some away.
“President Biden’s timeline was incomplete and misleading,” Comer said in a news release Wednesday. “It omitted months of communications, planning, and coordinating among multiple White House officials …
“There is no reasonable explanation as to why this many White House employees and lawyers were so concerned with retrieving boxes they believed only contained personal documents and materials.”
That raises many questions for Biden and his White House, as Turley noted in a column published Saturday by The Hill.
Claims by Biden and the Democrats that his classified document scandal was somehow better than the investigation surrounding Trump’s handling of classified documents were based largely on the argument that Biden’s team had been so forthcoming — notifying the National Archives about the situation as soon as it was discovered, etc.
But that wasn’t true, or even close to true, according to Comer’s timeline.
“Biden insisted that he was entirely ‘surprised’ by the discovery of the documents in Nov. 2021,” Turley wrote, citing establishment media accounts from January. “He echoed the narrative of both his lawyers and the media at large: ‘And they did what they should have done,’ he said. ‘They immediately called the Archives — immediately called the Archives, turned them over to the Archives, and I was briefed about this discovery.’”
If Comer’s timeline is the truth — Biden’s statement is not. It’s as simple as that.
And that raises the perennial Washington scandal question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
With Biden in the White House, that’s too easy to joke about. He often appears to know so little about what’s going on around him, it’s tempting to dismiss everything that comes out.
But this is different. The establishment media won’t acknowledge it, but Biden is about waist-deep in scandal right now and the waters keep rising.
Will Biden face consequences for his own classified documents scandal?
Yes: 40% (418 Votes)
No: 60% (640 Votes)
Anyone in the country who’s paying attention — regardless of their politics — knows that Biden’s son Hunter is bad news that keeps getting worse.
The part of the country that’s paying attention and isn’t blinded by partisan loyalty knows that what Comer’s committee has dug up so far — millions of dollars of evident bribes to Biden family shell corporations, for instance, or the documented participation of then-Vice President Biden in his son’s dubious overseas business discussions — raise the distinct possibility that the man in the White House is as corrupt as his son is crooked.
The fact that the No. 1 global rival of the United States, the communist giant of China, has played such a huge role in the Biden scandal stories raises huge national security concerns — to Americans who give a damn about their country.
What was in the documents that were uncovered that might have been removed in the months before Team Biden oh-so-scrupulously notified the National Archives that there were records from Biden’s years as Barack Obama’s No. 2 man that weren’t where they belonged? Did the material maybe cover the time Joe was taking part in telephone calls with Hunter business associates — peddling the prestige of the vice presidency like a pimp on the world stage?
Americans deserve to know it. Even Biden supporters — especially Biden supporters — deserve to know it.
The rabid, not-even-hidden partisanship of the legal prosecutions against Trump are almost ludicrously transparent at this point. But what’s bubbling up beneath the surface of Washington, again thanks to Comer’s investigation, has the potential to cause real problems for Biden.
As Turley noted, Biden was interviewed last week by special counsel Robert Hur. If he repeated his public statements about when the documents were discovered, if he repeated the lie to the special counsel that he told the American people, that would be a form of “obstruction” more blatant than anything Democrats tried to crucify Trump for.
Biden’s up to his waist now. Before too long, he could be up to his neck — and sinking fast.
