While the establishment media was fixated Tuesday on the legal theater of former President Donald Trump’s indictment in New York City, an entirely different drama was playing out in Washington.
The classified documents scandal the Biden administration no doubt hoped would have faded by now came back for a second act, thanks to Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer.
And if the release of the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment showed it wasn’t nearly as bad for Trump as liberals hoped it would be, the news for President Joe Biden could be much worse than the country imagined.
In a statement released Tuesday and in an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, Comer — chairman of the House Oversight Committee — announced that the picture previously painted, of classified documents being discovered by the Biden legal team in November (then kept secret until CBS News reported their existence in January), was wildly incorrect.
The documents were in a supposedly locked closet in the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a University of Pennsylvania think tank established in Washington in February 2018, shortly before the university began receiving tens of millions of dollars from donors in China.
In fact, Comer said, testimony from Kathy Chung, Biden’s former executive assistant, showed that the Biden White House had been trying to retrieve the documents since at least May of last year — six months before the public learned about them.
Comer also told Watters that the documents had been in unauthorized locations since Biden left the vice presidency at the end of former President Barack Obama’s second term in January 2017.
Check out the interview below. (Note: Watters’ tweet claims Chung “was caught squirreling classified documents all over DC.” Neither Comer’s statement nor his conversation with Watters indicated it was Chung who had done anything wrong — in fact, his tone toward her suggests the opposite. It’s possible Watters or whoever wrote the tweet knows more than was made public here, but it’s also possible the tweet is just incorrect.)
One of Biden’s assistants, Kathy Chung, was caught squirreling classified documents all over DC. She was even stashing them in Chinatown. You can’t make this up. @RepJamesComer has the details. pic.twitter.com/0h1B1gWrOt
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) April 5, 2023
After thanking Chung for her testimony, Comer said the committee had learned from her that “the documents didn’t just start mysteriously moving around in … November 2022, like the White House has alleged.”
“She said this dates back to May of 2022, that the documents were moved from the vice presidency to at least three different locations in a personal vehicle,” he said. “And why they were in three different locations, we don’t know.
“They weren’t stored behind any locks. One of the locations was in Chinatown. The other location was in the Penn Biden Center, which might as well have been Chinatown, by looking at where their money was coming from.
“The White House has never been honest with the American people. Remember, we never would have found out about this in March of 2023 if someone hadn’t leaked it in the press” that the documents had been found.
“So the White House then came back and said, ‘Yeah, that happened in November, December of 2022,'” the congressman said.
“She just testified under oath that it happened in May of 2022. So, there are more questions today than we’ve ever had,” he said.
Comer noted that a special counsel investigation into Trump’s handling of the classified documents that were seized in the FBI’s appalling raid on Trump’s home in August in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club is the potential source of another indictment against the former president.
What Joe Biden is suspected of doing could be far worse.
The laptop his son, Hunter, left in a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop has been a trove of information — almost all of it ignored by the establishment media water carriers — but the New York Post reported in January on one email on the laptop that showed Hunter might have shared with his colleagues at the Ukraine energy company Burisma the contents of at least one of the classified documents that should have been kept secure in his father’s office when the elder Biden was vice president.
“We don’t know how many locations he had,” Comer said. “We don’t know what those documents were. We’re very suspicious that his son sent one of those in an email to Ukraine, to his buddies at Burisma. …
“This is another example of a two-tiered system of justice in America.”
Comer’s revelations Tuesday put the Biden classified document scandal in a far worse light for the White House than it’s ever looked so far — and that was already pretty bad, considering it’s the subject of a special counsel investigation.
First, if it’s true that all of this was happening at least as far back as May 2022, it means the Biden White House flat-out lied to the American people when it claimed it didn’t know about the Penn Biden Center documents until November.
Sitting on the story of the documents through the midterm elections was dishonest but at least understandable from a political point of view. Flat-out lying about the timing after the documents were reported is a different matter. As the old saying goes, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.
But even worse, from any viewpoint, is that if the May timeline is true, it means, as Watters pointed out in a portion of the interview that wasn’t included in the Twitter post, that Biden’s FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home while knowing full well the president had a similar problem. Normal Democratic hypocrisy and dishonesty are one thing — engaging in it while sending armed agents of the government against a powerful political rival is the stuff of totalitarian dreams.
Finally, the classified documents scandal could well merge into the story of the Biden family’s financial ties with China — which essentially would tie an American president to benefitting financially from his own country’s biggest global threat.
The mainstream media world went bananas on much less evidence — or probability — when it came to then-President Donald Trump in 2017.
While the country — and the world — was riveted on the legal farce playing out in New York, the potentially far more serious spectacle of the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into a sitting president was being all but ignored.
But it could well be the only show that really matters.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
