SPERRY: Biden Staffer Who Mishandled China, Iran Secrets and techniques Retains Excessive-Safety Pentagon Job | The Gateway Pundit

By Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations:

Whereas Particular Counsel Robert Kyoung Hur has raised the difficulty of psychological deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for unlawful retention and sharing of categorised paperwork, the president selected one other rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his information as he left the vp’s workplace in 2017.

At a press convention unexpectedly assembled after the report’s launch, Biden mentioned he assumed his aides had shipped “all” the paperwork to the Nationwide Archives in School Park, Md. “I wish I had paid more attention to how the documents were being moved and where,” he mentioned. “I thought they were being moved to the Archives. I thought all of it was being moved [there].”

The president’s clarification doesn’t tackle how and why he shared categorised materials with a ghostwriter, however it shines a lightweight on the longtime assistant who was accountable for packing his papers, Kathy Sang-ok Chung.

Chung, an outdated good friend of Hunter Biden, started working for Joe Biden in 2012 when he was vp. She instructed investigators she oversaw the switch of the contents of Biden’s file cupboards and desk drawers into 15 containers when he moved out of the West Wing in January 2017. Whereas different workplace materials did go to the Nationwide Archives, Hur rebuked Biden for conserving greater than 600 pages of categorised data – together with navy secrets and techniques and intelligence sources and strategies – in unlocked and unauthorized containers at a number of areas, together with a tattered field within the storage of Biden’s Delaware house. The stash included data marked “top secret” involving Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. A few of the secrets and techniques are compartmented by codewords and might solely be saved and browse in a safe facility referred to as a SCIF.

The Biden paperwork that Chung herself packed, unpacked, and repacked “are the most highly classified, sensitive and compartmented materials recovered during our investigation,” Hur wrote.

But the prosecutor let Chung in addition to Biden off the hook in additionally declining to press expenses in opposition to her, explaining that he discovered believable her account that she packed and saved the categorised papers “by mistake, ”regardless that she had prior authorities expertise dealing with and figuring out categorised data and was instructed in a Jan. 3, 2017, Nationwide Safety Council memo to make sure you take away “only unclassified personal records,” and regardless of offering inconsistent solutions to investigators.

After the election, Biden appointed Chung to a prime Pentagon place serving as assistant to Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin, the place she has entry to the nation’s most delicate navy secrets and techniques.

Hur additionally went to nice lengths to guard her id in his 388-page report. He refers to her solely as “Executive Assistant” and her face is intentionally blurred via pixilation in a photograph he printed of her sitting in entrance of a file cupboard in her West Wing workplace, the place she saved Biden’s secret papers.

Kathy Chung intentionally pixilated: Picture from Particular Counsel Hur’s report.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served as President Barack Obama’s Protection Intelligence Company director and President Donald Trump’s nationwide safety adviser, is amongst those that consider Chung deserves way more public scrutiny. “What is very clear is Chung needs to be further investigated,” Flynn instructed RealClearInvestigations. “She should have her clearance immediately suspended and probably revoked completely.”

This isn’t the primary time Chung has been discovered to have mishandled delicate authorities paperwork. Within the late Nineteen Nineties, when she labored with Hunter Biden on the Commerce Division as an administrator, she and her boss Melissa Moss had been cited by a federal decide for failing to show over paperwork sought in a Freedom of Info Act case, as RealClearInvestigations first reported. They had been accused of withholding and even destroying key paperwork in a search that the decide dominated “grossly inadequate” and “unlawful.”

A lawyer for Chung didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Chung was interviewed twice by FBI brokers: as soon as on Jan. 4, 2023, and once more on Sept. 28, 2023. Particulars of Chung’s key function in considered one of Washington’s worst violations of legal guidelines safeguarding nationwide safety secrets and techniques are reported right here for the primary time. Hur’s personal report, nonetheless, undermines his conclusion that Chung was seemingly unaware of the voluminous categorised materials she repeatedly dealt with.

The document reveals that Chung personally dispersed the delicate materials to no less than three areas within the years when Biden was out of workplace, 2017-2021 – together with two momentary workplace websites earlier than they had been “discovered” in 2022 on the Penn Biden Heart in D.C. in an unlocked workplace frequented by guests. She routinely retrieved information Biden requested – some stamped with the label “EYES ONLY” which she knew to imply the contents inside had been categorised. And most of the categorised folders embrace markings in her handwriting. She additionally helped establish materials in 2022, when the president’s retention of categorised paperwork turned a problem after his Division of Justice raided Donald Trump’s Florida house searching for secret materials.

The trail that the extremely delicate nationwide safety paperwork took from the White Home is a circuitous one fraught with potential breaches of safety.

‘Eyes Only’

Within the final days of Biden’s vice presidency, Chung packed up his information from his West Wing suite, the majority of which had been saved within the entrance workplace she manned. She mentioned she packed the supplies in containers supplied by the Common Companies Administration in an operation that took “a couple of days” in January 2017. Chung instructed investigators she “did not believe the files contained classified documents.” She claimed she didn’t pay shut consideration to what she was packing, as a result of she was in a rush. Nonetheless, she additionally mentioned she knew on the time that Biden “was going to write a book,” which she helped him analysis.

Chung first shipped the 15 containers to a close-by “transition office” leased by the GSA, the place among the containers had been unpacked and the place she met with Biden over the subsequent six months. On the identical time, Biden rented a house in McLean, Va., the place Hur mentioned among the categorised supplies seem to have ended up in Biden’s basement workplace.

It’s unclear if Chung had a job in shifting any of the containers to the McLean rental, however after the GSA lease expired in Might 2017, she reloaded the containers in her automobile and moved them to a personal workplace that she leased in D.C., in response to a partial transcript of her closed-door testimony earlier than the Home Oversight Committee. “It was near Chinatown,” she instructed lawmakers throughout her April 4, 2023, deposition.

The containers containing extremely categorised papers remained on the web site for a number of months. Curiously, Hur mentions this location solely in passing, regardless that it was an essential hyperlink within the chain of custody. It doesn’t seem that he investigated the safety system there. Nor does it seem that Chung was requested what she or Biden did with the information whereas they had been saved there. In a footnote, Hur famous that Biden met with the previous prime minister of Ukraine at that momentary workplace house in Might 2017.

Then in October 2017, Chung relocated the 15 containers just a few blocks away to the newly constructed Penn Biden Heart on the sixth ground of one other D.C. workplace constructing, the place she unpacked Biden’s White Home paperwork – together with some marked “top secret” – and positioned them right into a three-drawer submitting cupboard in her outer workplace adjoining Biden’s workplace, which was designed to resemble his outdated West Wing suite. Different paperwork had been left in containers stacked in an unlocked storage closet, refuting preliminary White Home claims they had been saved in a “locked closet.” Remarkably, your entire workplace suite was by no means locked up, which meant just about anyone who obtained previous the safety guard within the foyer of the constructing had entry to the categorised information saved there.

“Mr. Biden’s office did not lock,” Hur famous in his report, “and the adjoining outer office where Mr. Biden’s executive assistant maintained his files was always accessible through Mr. Biden’s office.” In a footnote, Hur added that “the Vice President’s office could only be locked from the inside using a panic button.”

Workplace safety obtained much more “relaxed” in early 2019, Hur revealed, when guests to the Penn Biden Heart now not wanted a key fob or an escort to entry the sixth ground of the constructing. Biden’s workplace, full of secret authorities paperwork together with high-level memos on China, was left just about open to the general public – together with College of Pennsylvania college students who took courses on the middle and had been allowed to work within the workplace house in the course of the day.

The middle is hosted by the College of Pennsylvania, which has acquired a number of million {dollars} from nameless Chinese language donors since opening the middle. In 2020, the middle hosted a symposium that includes Chinese language communist officers.

It’s not recognized if Hunter Biden – who launched Chung to his father in 2012 and obtained her the job in his White Home workplace – escorted any of his Chinese language enterprise companions to the sixth ground. However Hunter had entry to the middle. The Chinese language nationals, who paid Hunter thousands and thousands of {dollars}, have been linked to Chinese language navy intelligence. Certainly one of them, Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, who was the topic of an FBI counterintelligence investigation and later convicted of bribery, saved an workplace within the D.C. space.

Hur mentioned his group was unable to find out precisely who could have had entry to the loosely saved intelligence papers and whether or not they handed via overseas palms: “We cannot account for all visitors to the center.” Why? The safety contractor deleted all of the customer logs for the years 2017 via 2021, he defined.

Chung claimed she doesn’t bear in mind seeing any categorised papers or any categorised markings on the paperwork she packed, unpacked, and finally repacked – on the request of Biden’s attorneys – in 2022.

“The executive assistant did not specifically recall any of the folders containing classified documents, although she acknowledged that they could have been files she maintained for Mr. Biden in the West Wing,” Hur wrote in his report.

Chung was fairly aware of their contents, nonetheless. Lots of the file folders had been marked along with her handwriting. Quite a few information additionally contained handwritten notes from Biden advising Chung that he wished the contents “saved” or “filed,” slightly than archived, in case he wished them later.

“Mr. Biden occasionally asked his executive assistant to retrieve material for him from the files she maintained,” Hur famous, together with categorised materials.

For instance, on Dec. 12, 2015, then-Vice President Biden wrote a word to Chung within the nook of a categorised paper requesting one other categorised doc he wished saved for his information. Clearly marked “SECRET,” the doc was a “call sheet” detailing the aim of a name between the then-Ukrainian prime minister and Biden, together with Biden’s speaking factors for the decision. Biden instructed Chung to “[g]et copy of this conversation from Sit Rm [the Situation Room] for my Records please.” Chung, in flip, obtained the transcript Biden ordered and filed it together with the categorised name sheet inside a folder labeled “VP Personal,” and saved the folder in a credenza behind her desk, in response to the particular counsel’s report, which incorporates an appendix inventorying the entire categorised supplies investigators recovered from Biden’s sprawling assortment.

The Secret Name Sheet

GOP lawmakers main an impeachment inquiry of Biden wish to get their palms on the decision sheet and the transcript of Biden’s dialog with the Ukrainian chief, as a result of the dialog befell across the time Biden pressured him to fireside a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating a Ukrainian oligarch who was paying his son Hunter thousands and thousands of {dollars} to take a seat on the board of his power conglomerate, Burisma Holdings.

On Monday, Home Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer despatched a letter to Garland asking for the supplies by Feb. 19 or he would compel their manufacturing via a subpoena. “There is concern that President Biden may have retained sensitive documents related to specific countries involving his family’s foreign business dealings,” Comer defined.

FBI brokers requested Chung how she may miss so many categorised paperwork within the information she repeatedly dealt with. She instructed them she was educated to establish categorised paperwork by the orange or pink coversheets that had been “usually always” included with such papers. And the categorised paperwork that had been recovered didn’t have such covers, she mentioned, and had been blended in with unclassified supplies, so they didn’t bounce out at her.

However the categorised Ukraine supplies had been contained in an envelope marked “EYES ONLY,” as had been categorised CIA supplies she dealt with in regards to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nonetheless, the envelopes weren’t technically marked categorised, she instructed the investigators; and apart from, she by no means noticed the “EYES ONLY” stamps whereas packing, unpacking, and repacking the envelopes.

Hur accepted her clarification. “Even if she had seen the envelope,” he wrote, “it is reasonable to believe she did not know the contents were classified and would not have looked inside to check because of the EYES ONLY stamp.” Due to this fact, he concluded, there was “insufficient evidence” to cost Chung with willful retention of the categorised paperwork within the EYES ONLY envelopes recovered on the Penn Biden Heart.

Nonetheless, in her congressional testimony Chung indicated that she did know that an EYES ONLY stamp on an envelope meant the contents had been categorised. After a Home Oversight Committee staffer requested her, “Can you describe for me how you might know a document’s classified?” Chung replied: “Things that I’ve come across always had a cover on it. It was either orange or red, or it was in an envelope, and those were usually for EYES ONLY.”

On the time of her April 4 testimony, congressional investigators didn’t know what categorised supplies had been recovered by the FBI. They didn’t know she had dealt with the EYES ONLY Ukrainian and Iranian supplies.

Slicing Chung Slack

When Hur’s group interviewed Chung a number of months later, that they had entry to the transcript of her earlier testimony. Apparently, Hur by no means challenged her to clarify the inconsistency between what she was telling his investigators and what she instructed congressional investigators.

Chung had another excuse to acknowledge the categorised nature of the Iran nuclear information she maintained: She was immediately concerned of their manufacturing and supply. The paperwork had been a part of a CIA briefing Biden had requested for a closed-door White Home breakfast assembly with U.S. senators he held in January 2015 to foyer for his or her assist for the Iran nuclear deal. Earlier than the assembly, Chung labored with a navy aide to ship the Iran briefing papers to the vp, in response to emails.

“Can you pls put note on the docs he [Biden] was asking about to highlight it,” Chung wrote the navy aide, who replied, “They just went up [to Biden] and the document said for VP eyes only.”

FBI investigators had been capable of affirm with the CIA that the Iran “EYES ONLY” bundle Chung secured and filed for Biden was the identical manilla envelope of supplies recovered from the Penn Biden Heart. Contained in the envelope had been the CIA briefing papers clearly marked “TOP SECRET” and “INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT.” It additionally contained about 10 pages of handwritten notes Biden took concerning the briefing, all of which had been deemed categorised.

Nonetheless, Hur mentioned he discovered her actions “innocent,” and that she eliminated the extremely categorised supplies from the White Home “unwittingly.” He mentioned the identical factor about her retaining categorised White Home memos about China.

“In her interview with the Special Counsel’s office,” he concluded, “she credibly stated that she did not know the files she maintained included marked classified documents.”

Hur even supplied “the possibility that the executive assistant and Mr. Biden simply forgot about them.”

Relating to the illegal retention of the Iran paperwork, Hur requested Biden about his 2015 assembly with senators over the Iran nuke deal and his CIA briefing notes throughout his two-day interview with the president final October. “Mr. Biden had no recollection of the breakfast or the handwritten notes,” the prosecutor reported. But in his personal 2017 memoir, Biden states that the Iran deal “may be the most momentous” occasion of the eight years he and Obama had been in workplace. And he particularly boasted of his “effort to convince Congress to sign off on the pact.”

After leaving workplace, Biden had a seamless curiosity within the Iran nuclear deal, together with defending it in opposition to criticism by President Trump, who threatened to tug out of the pact and did so in 2018. In response, Biden ready speeches and memos with Penn Biden Heart workers advocating for the deal. Additionally they developed speaking factors on the topic for Biden’s conferences with Israeli leaders on the middle. Holding on to the Iran intelligence and notes would have helped Biden formulate such arguments and been helpful supply materials for his memoir.

Because the guardian of his information, Chung helped Biden analysis the guide, “Promise Me, Dad.” It’s not recognized if Biden or Chung referenced any of the supplies from the containers within the authentic manuscript of his guide, which was printed in November 2017 and revealed insider accounts of Biden’s numerous roles in U.S. overseas coverage, together with Ukraine. It additionally talked about the Iran nuclear deal, however didn’t go into element concerning the negotiations. Biden listed Chung first amongst individuals he acknowledged for his or her contributions: “Thank you for all of this, and more, to Kathy Chung.”

Chung additionally labored with Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. In February 2017, a couple of month after Biden left workplace, Hur mentioned Biden mentioned a categorised memo on Afghanistan with Zwonitzer whereas they met at his McLean, Va., rental house. Zwonitzer taped their dialog, and although he deleted his recordings after studying a particular prosecutor had been appointed to research Biden’s categorised docs scandal, Hur was capable of get FBI computer-forensics consultants to revive the audio. (Hur declined to prosecute Zwonitzer as a result of he mentioned he couldn’t ensure he was attempting to hinder his investigation.) On the tapes, Biden will be heard saying he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Downstairs from the place they met was Biden’s workplace, the place he saved his papers.

Hur believes Biden was referring to the identical marked categorised paperwork about navy and overseas coverage in Afghanistan that FBI brokers present in 2022 in his Delaware storage. (He moved the information he saved in his non-public workplace in McLean to Wilmington in 2019.) Biden final week denied sharing any categorised intelligence together with his ghostwriter, and he asserted he has no thought how the categorised papers on Afghanistan navy technique and troops wound up in a field in his storage.

Additionally a part of Biden’s guide group was Biden’s private lawyer Bob Bauer, who brokered the contract with the writer Flatiron Books, an imprint of MacMillan Publishers. Bauer occurred to be one of many attorneys who tried to ship Biden’s Penn Biden stash of paperwork to his house in Wilmington and to a legislation workplace in Boston only a few months earlier than the Justice Division raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property searching for categorised paperwork.

In impact, Hur exonerated Chung and Biden over the extremely categorised paperwork that had been stashed in closets, credenzas, and cupboards on the Penn Biden Heart. He concluded that the containers of secret White Home papers merely ended up there “by mistake.”

“The evidence suggests that the marked classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center were sent and kept there by mistake,” he concluded in his report. “Therefore, we decline any criminal charges related to those documents.”

The Division of Justice gave former President Trump and his aides no such good thing about the doubt in regards to the categorised paperwork discovered at Mar-a-Lago. Particular Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump for “willful retention of classified documents,” amongst different alleged crimes. He additionally charged two Mar-a-Lago staff with conspiracy to hide categorised information and obstruction of justice.

Trump is predicted to file a movement to dismiss the DOJ’s case in opposition to him, arguing “selective prosecution” primarily based on DOJ declining to indict Biden over related allegations. His attorneys have till Feb. 18 to file such pretrial motions.

This RealClearInvestigations article was republished by The Gateway Pundit with permission.

Paul Sperry is the previous D.C. bureau chief for Investor’s Enterprise Every day, Hoover Establishment media fellow, creator of a number of books, together with bestseller INFILTRATION