Comer probing White House’s ‘incomplete and misleading’ Biden classified docs timeline.
This article first appeared in the NY Post on October 11th.
James Comer is demanding that the White House explain why it put out an “incomplete and misleading” timeline related to the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center.
Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said the panel obtained evidence that President Biden’s aides began inspecting the material at his private office nearly 20 months before the sensitive papers were said to be found.
“The Committee is concerned by the omissions in President Biden’s timeline based on the following discoveries,” Comer notes in a letter sent to White House Counsel Edward Siskel on Wednesday.
Annie Tomasini, the 80-year-old president’s senior adviser, was the first of five White House staffers and a Department of Defense employee, to rummage through the documents and materials at Biden’s Washington, DC, think tank office, Comer claims.
This incident occurred just two months after the president’s inauguration, on March 18, 2021.
The Kentucky Republican details four other expeditions to retrieve material from the Penn Biden Center that was previously unknown.
On May 24, 2022, Comer claimed that former White House counsel and Assistant to the President Dana Remus contacted former Biden aide and Department of Defense employee Kathy Chung – via her personal email address – to retrieve the commander in chief’s papers at the Penn Biden Center.
A month later, on June 28, 2022, Chung packed up Biden’s things at the think tank office, according to Comer.
Then, on June 30, 2022, Remus, White House staffer Anthony Bernal and another unknown White House employee went to Penn Biden Center to “take possession of the boxes of documents and materials but could not fit all of the boxes into their vehicle.”
“The next wave of assessing of files and looking at boxes,” according to the oversight chairman, began on Oct. 12, 2022, when White House staffer Ashley Williams and Biden’s personal attorney Pat Moore visited the president’s former office.
The following day, Williams returned to Penn Biden Center and left with “a few” of Biden’s boxes, and Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, texted Chung that Moore had begun sorting through the boxes.
“Each of the encounters above was omitted from the White House’s and President Biden’s personal attorney’s public statements,” Comer argues, noting that a January statement from Bauer included a timeline of event that “inexplicably” begins on Nov. 2, 2022 – when the lawyer claims he first stumbled upon classified material that was stored at the Penn Biden Center.
“President Biden’s timeline was incomplete and misleading,” Comer writes. “It omitted months of communications, planning, and coordinating among multiple White House officials, Ms. Chung, Penn Biden Center employees, and President Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve the boxes containing classified materials.”
The oversight chairman adds that “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.”
Comer requests transcribed interviews with the White House staffers involved in the previously unknown activity at the Penn Biden Center, and access to all White House communications regarding the movement of material from the think tank and the drafting of public statements related to the discovery of sensitive documents.
The letter comes days after special counsel Robert Hur, who is overseeing the Justice Department’s probe into Biden’s mishandling of White House documents, conducted two “voluntary” interviews with the president at the executive mansion.
“As we have said from the beginning, the President and the White House are cooperating with this investigation, and as it has been appropriate, we have provided relevant updates publicly, being as transparent as we can consistent with protecting and preserving the integrity of the investigation,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, said Monday.
The Nov. 2, 2022, discovery of at least a dozen classified documents – some related to the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Iran – at his old office near the US Capitol was kept under wraps by the White House through the 2022 midterm elections and for weeks after.
More sensitive documents were discovered in Biden’s Wimington home in January after an FBI search. The bureau also searched the president’s Rehoboth Beach, Del., home as part of the probe but did not turn up any additional documents.
Biden has dismissed the shocking findings as simply “stray papers” that ended up on his property and private office because of careless aides who packed up his White House office over a decade ago.
