Biden 'frustrated' by aides who packed the classified documents and brought the ongoing fallout: NBC
NBC News' Monica Alba reported Sunday evening that President Joe Biden is "irritated" and "frustrated" over those who packed up the office and included classified documents among the items packed.
The National Archives didn't have any knowledge about the documents that were in his possession for the past six years. In the case of Donald Trump, there were over 13,000 documents taken that included many, many boxes of information that he then refused to turn over.
At first, Trump tried to blame the General Services Administration (GSA) for having top-secret government documents stashed at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The GSA staffs the White House valets and a team that cares for a president. But it turns out that the White House staff signed off on taking the documents.
"More than 100 pages of emails and shipping lists between White House and transition staff and the US General Services Administration describe the minutiae of moving the Trump White House from Washington, DC, to Florida, down to how many rolls of bubble wrap and tape, all within a plan signed by then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows," Bloomberg News reported last October. "One thing is clear: The boxes were packed when the movers got there."
Bloomberg also cited an email correspondence that "strongly suggests that GSA was only involved in facilitating the shipping of the items and may not have had a role in packing the boxes." They explained that the email exchanges from GSA officials gave Trump aides specific instructions for how to pack and prepare the boxes for shipping.
Speaking to Fox's Sean Hannity, top Trump aide Kash Patel even went so far as to say, "President Trump invited the DOJ in and said, whatever you guys need."
That story has since changed from the Trump perspective. Assuming Trump's packing method was similar to Biden's, it's reasonable to assume that in Biden's case, the staff also packed up the boxes. NBC News reports that it's one of the reasons that Biden is so upset about the ordeal.
Speaking to MSNBC on Sunday, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage said that it's clear that the Republican Congress is attempting to weaponize the Biden case as a means of aiding Donald Trump.
"That bit of hypocrisy is obvious in terms of what is really going on here, which is the interesting ambivalence of Republicans in the House about the employment of this special counsel," said Savage. "That's going to interfere with their ability to hold the judgment hearings and call witnesses if there is an ongoing investigation run by a Trump appointee, who obviously does not need that stuff being aired until he can figure it out."
Biden's White House recently released a set of visitor logs, which would show who came and went from the property in which the documents were stored. Savage said that the Mar-a-Lago visitor logs should similarly be released.
White House reporter Eugene Daniels said that he, too, has been hearing how sloppy things have gone around the handling of the Biden story.
"From the very beginning, what we know, is they [presidents] are often not packing up their own things as they are leaving the White House," said Daniels. "Other people are doing that. The Department of Justice started to talk to the then-vice president at that time. Of course, he's probably frustrated, because he has talked about how much he takes seriously government information, compartmented top secret information in documents, and then this happens. Especially at a time when he is in the White House, we're having a really good run of it, a good few weeks, and then this week, it is kind of a sloppy job by the White House to explain it."
He said that it would have been better and more transparent if Biden had told Americans about it when it happened instead of allowing things to leak. Now things are likely to be quiet."
"Once the lawyers get involved, there's a lot less to say in how they get to talk about some of these things," Daniels predicted.
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