Nine boxes of documents were taken from President Joe Biden’s Washington DC think tank and shipped to the Boston office of his attorney Patrick Moore, and have yet to be reviewed for classified material, the National Archives disclosed in a Tuesday letter responding to Sens. Rob Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Moore shipped the boxes from the Penn Biden Center from his Boston office before discovering the initial trove of classified documents at the DC-based think tank, Fox News reports.
In response to questions by Johnson and Grassley in a Feb. 24 letter asking how and when the archives learned that records were transported to Boston, Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall responded the agency learned about it on Nov. 3, 2022.
“When NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] contacted President Biden’s personal counsel on November 3, 2022, to arrange to pick up boxes from the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., they informed NARA that Mr. Moore had moved other boxes from the Penn Biden Center to Mr. Moore’s law firm in Boston,” reads the letter.
What’s more, the archives told the DOJ Office of the Inspector General on Nov. 4 that the documents had been moved. They were then picked up on Nov. 9, where they were secured at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.
“NARA staff retrieved nine boxes from Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” said Wall, who added that NARA doesn’t know about any other locations where Biden may have stored records from his days as vice president. Under US law, presidential and vice presidential records must be handed to NARA for preservation when a president leaves office.
“NARA only has direct knowledge about boxes that were located at the Penn Biden Center and at Mr. Moore’s office in Boston,” wrote Wall. “NARA has informed DOJ that, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA), any Presidential or Vice Presidential records that DOJ obtains from any other location must be returned to NARA no later than the conclusion of their investigation.”
Meanwhile, the Archives – despite having possession of the boxes since November – “has not reviewed the contents of the boxes found at Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” the letter reads.
After the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center office in mid-November, where they found several documents with classified markings, more documents were found at his Wilmington, Delaware home.
The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, is where Biden worked out of between 2017 and 2019 on the sixth-floor. He was granted an honorary professorship and was paid roughly $900,000 for giving around 12 lectures and talks.
As the Epoch Times notes,
During a Senate Intelligence hearing on Wednesday, Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) expressed frustration over the intelligence community’s refusal to grant congressional access to classified documents recovered from locations associated with Biden, Trump, and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Warner argued that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s stance of denying the committee access to classified documents “that we have every right to see in terms of our oversight role” doesn’t “pass the smell test.”
“This trust relationship has to go two ways,” he said, referring to the committee and intelligence community relationship.
Biden has tried to downplay the classified materials found at the Penn Biden Center and his home in Wilmington, Delaware. On Feb. 8, he claimed their contents dated back to 1974 and were simply “stray papers.”
This attempt came in response to a journalist’s question about Biden’s previous comments regarding classified materials found at Trump’s Florida estate in August 2022, which Biden referred to as “totally irresponsible.”
Biden also shifted the blame to staffers who he said had not done a thorough job of going through paperwork from his former office.
“But one of the things that happened is that what was not done well is, as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there,” he said.
Former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur has been appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland as the special counsel to oversee the DOJ’s inquiry into the documents. Hur’s mandate is to determine whether Biden or those associated with him violated the law in their handling of the documents.
