They always accuse you of the very things they're doing themselves. If there's one rule you can keep on your fridge, write it down, put it in your wallet to evaluate the behavior of the people in charge, it's that. They blame you for their sins every single time. The latest example arrived this week when we learned that Joe Biden, fresh from lecturing us about how Donald Trump was a criminal because he had unauthorized possession of secret documents, that very same Joe Biden himself had unauthorized possession of secret documents, but don't worry, it's not a big deal.
Unlike you and that despicably orange Donald Trump, Joe Biden is a good person. Joe Biden is so virtuous he has transcended temporal law. It's not a crime when he does it. So, that's the frustratingly familiar headline from this week's story, which you've probably seen by now, but the details of the story are actually pretty interesting. So, a week before these last midterm elections, Joe Biden's lawyers were, for some reason, rooting around in a locked closet in the Washington office of something called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, and while in that locked closet, Biden's lawyers found a sheaf of highly classified government documents.
The first question here is: Why were Joe Biden's lawyers doing this in the first place? We can't say for sure because they haven't told us, but it is weird. Lawyers don't typically search locked closets. Yours probably don't, but Biden's lawyers did, and we guess they did because they understood that Republicans were about to win back the House and with it, congressional subpoena power. They were likely conducting a cleanup operation preemptively trying to get ahead of a scandal they knew was coming and, of course, they hid what they found in that closet until after the midterm elections, because there's no reason to influence voters too much with information. So, there's that, and then there's the question of the so-called Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
What is that exactly? The whole idea of an academic Biden center is pretty funny. Joe Biden is a moron. He's always been a moron even before the dementia. For decades in Washington, ask anyone who lived there, Biden was famous as the dumbest member of the Senate. People made jokes about it. So, why would an Ivy League university name a think tank after a man who can't think and then pay him nearly a million dollars a year for not doing anything? Hmm. Good question. Well, more on that in just a minute, but first, a word about classified documents.
BIDEN 'SURPRISED' TO LEARN OF CLASSIFIED DOCS AT PENN THINK TANK: 'I DON'T KNOW' WHAT'S IN THEM
Now, this is not a partisan point, not attacking anybody. It's just the truth. These people you see on television huffing and puffing about vital state secrets on both sides, by the way, not just Democrats, everybody, vital state secrets, they're either lying or they don't really understand how Washington works. How many legitimate, vital state secrets are there? Well actually, not very many at all. In a democracy, the government has no right to hide what it's doing from the public except under extraordinary circumstances. It's fine to classify the Normandy invasion until it happens. It is not fine to spend 60 years hiding the fact that the CIA was involved in the murder of a president. Hiding your involvement in the Kennedy assassination is not a national security precaution. It is criminal behavior and it's made possible by a classification regime that was designed not to protect this country, but to protect and enrich our permanent political class, which it very efficiently does.
"Oh, but our enemies,: screech the morons on TV. "If we had declassified these documents, whatever they are, if we do that, our enemies will learn our secrets." Please. China already knows our secrets, all of our secrets. The Chinese government has hacked every agency in Washington, and everybody knows that and nobody seems to care. The Biden administration cares so little in fact, it just suspended a counter-espionage program designed to stop Chinese spying. In other words, the Chinese can know, but you can't know. Biden trusts Beijing more than he trusts you.
The media's job, its only job really, is to push back against attitudes like that and to seek the truth. Reporters are the people who are paid, who for a living find out what your government is doing and then tell you about it so democracy can continue, but there are very few of those left. Julian Assange is in prison for his efforts. Ed Snowden lives in exile and the news organizations that remain are so thoroughly controlled by government agencies that even the suggestion of more public transparency drives them to hysteria. Watch CNN and MSNBC, for example, react to the news that Republicans in Congress might tell us some of what the thoroughly corrupt intel community has been doing in our name.
DEMOCRATS DOWNPLAY BIDEN'S CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS: 'NO COMPARISON' TO MAR-A-LAGO
DAVID JOLLY, FORMER GOP REP: A House committee where Republicans can shred at the integrity of the federal government and tell America that your government is spying on you and coming after you. That is at the heart of this "tear down, break down the government. We can't trust the government. We're going to topple it." He just gave them a committee platform to have those hearings and you better believe that is going to be heroin in the veins of Fox News viewers over the next two years.
ADAM SCHIFF: Basically, they’re establishing a subcommittee or a committee on witch hunts and deep state conspiracy theories.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: This is so extraordinarily dangerous as you said... These people want to target America’s intel community?
REP. JAMES CLYBURN: This is a body of the Congress that we are trying to maintain credibility with, and we’re not going to do that by opening up all kinds of suspicions about the institutions in our society.
BIDEN ONCE PLANNED TO FIRE US ATTORNEY WHO IS TAPPED TO INVESTIGATE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
It's outrageous to tell people the government is spying on them, especially since the government is spying on them. That's confirmed, by the way. That's a fact. They spied on us, but if you want to know what your government is doing, scolds Joe Scarborough, you're "targeting America's intel community." You're unpatriotic. You're a disloyal American if you don't want to be lied to. That's what they're saying out loud on MSNBC tonight. In the past few months, we've learned that for years, Twitter functioned as a mouthpiece for the FBI and the spy agencies. Clearly, the same thing has happened to cable news and that is a graver threat to our democracy than any group of Trump voters who wandered around the Capitol on January 6. It's not even close, but back to our story and the hilariously obvious double standard on the question of classified documents.
It was just this summer that NBC's hyperventilating House historian Michael Beschloss suggested that Donald Trump deserved the death penalty for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Fried like the Rosenbergs in the electric chair. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden agreed. "Sounds about right," Hayden wrote, because at this point it’s totally normal for CIA directors to fantasize about killing American presidents. Just for fun today, we reached out to Michael Beschloss to ask what punishment he thinks Joe Biden deserves for keeping classified documents in his office. Of course, Beschloss didn't respond to us. He was too busy applying pancake makeup in his living room for another MSNBC hit, but to be fair, it wasn't just Michael Beschloss who claimed that Trump was endangering America with those documents. They all said that.
LAURA COATES, CNN: The seriousness of the potential threat to national security information. I just don’t know what to say.
ASHA RANGAPPA, MSNBC: If he was in possession of classified documents, those were by definition potentially harmful to our national security.
CARL BERNSTEIN: We have a president of the United States playing fast and loose with the national security.
NORMAN EISEN: We have a situation where what he was doing was dangerous to our national security.
CAMILA DECHALUS: These are really classified and really a threat to national security.
DANIEL GOLDMAN: That really jumps out to me as a national security threat.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC: This is a national security crisis.
JOY REID: The extreme risk Trump was willing to take with our national security.
10 UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT BIDEN'S CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
The funniest part was Bernstein, formerly the Washington Post, who literally participated in an FBI operation — not guessing, documented — an FBI operation to drive a sitting, duly elected president from office. Carl Bernstein participated in that and he's lecturing us about how, "No, we have to keep the secret things secret." Last night we learned that Joe Biden, someone with no power to declassify anything when he was vice president, stashed classified documents in the closet of his private office at the very same time he was sending the DOJ after Donald Trump for doing the same thing. How exactly are our news media going to make sense of this? Well, of course, with maximum shamelessness. Today, CNN trotted out a CIA lawyer called Brian Greer to explain that mishandling classified information is no longer a big deal, in fact, honestly, kids, it happens all the time.
BRIAN GREER, FORMER CIA ATTORNEY: Almost any mishandling case could potentially be shoehorned into a criminal investigation, but going back to my prior point, because this type of mishandling happens all the time and now it's become such a political football with all three last presidential candidates being investigated – I do worry about, while we need to take this all seriously and it needs to be investigated, I do worry about over-criminalizing it. Launching these full investigations that become political footballs is dangerous because it can disincentivize people from serving in the federal government, but we do want to incentivize them to do the right thing, which is report it when it happens, and not do the wrong thing, which is to conceal and obstruct, which is what Trump did.
Some of us who've worked in cable news for the past 25 years can affirm it wasn't always the case that every time you flipped on the tube, there was some CIA or NSA or FBI employee telling you what the truth is, because news organizations used to assume that if someone was paid to lie for the government, they probably weren't a reliable oracle on TV. They probably weren't telling the truth to viewers, but now it's the norm. The CIA lawyer you just saw, Brian Greer, was telling us just a few months ago that Donald Trump, by doing the same thing that Biden did, endangered "national security." The intelligence agencies, Greer said, "have no choice but to assume a compromise and take proactive measures to protect our sources and collection capabilities." Oh, that was then, like August. Now, he's telling you this kind of thing happens all the time. "Just calm down. Calm down." The rest of the news media has been every bit as brazen. The Washington Post just reported that, "The case will likely draw comparisons to Mar-a-Lago but appears quite different." Really? How is it quite different?
UNLIKE TRUMP, BIDEN DIDN’T TAKE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS 'WILLFULLY,' MSNBC ANALYST ARGUES
By the way, every news source is telling us there were 10 documents. How do they know that? Well, of course, they don't know that. They have no idea how many documents were found. They're just taking Biden's lawyers' word for it. That's not news collection. That's press release writing, but you will see identical articles in Forbes, in Business Insider and the Hill, the usual places, all repeating the same, scripted talking point. Now, in one sense, what those outlets are telling you is true.
Joe Biden, we learned today, was not holding on to the kind of cocktail napkins found at Mar-a-Lago. He had actual classified information about a bunch of countries, including Ukraine, from his time as vice president. Why? Why is it always about Ukraine? What is going on in Ukraine? Don't talk about the biolabs. What is that? Why the obsession with Ukraine going back long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, going back many years? Well, in this case, it turns out that three days before Joe Biden left his job as vice president in January of 2017, the Ukrainians were also a little bit confused about the focus on their country.
In mid-January 2017, State Department officials circulated a report from Ukrinform. That's the Ukrainian state media organization and the report said this, and we're quoting: "Literally on the last days of his term, the U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is going to Kyiv. How can we explain this attention to us?" So, even Ukrainians were confused. Why is the president of the United States, the world's richest country, spending so much of his life focused on Europe's poorest country, Ukraine? What's going on? Well, here's one explanation.
RUSSIA THREATENS TO SEIZE PROPERTY FROM BUSINESSES IN OCCUPIED UKRAINE THAT REFUSE TO USE RUBLE
At the same moment that Joe Biden was visiting Ukraine as his last official act, his drug-addicted son, Hunter, was still making tens of thousands of dollars a month in a no-show job on the board of Burisma, the largest gas company in Ukraine. Natural gas, something Hunter Biden knew nothing about. Hunter Biden would hold that fake job until 2019. So, is there a connection — just guessing here — between the fact that his son was getting rich from Ukraine for a no-show job and Joe Biden's 2017 trip to Ukraine on Air Force Two at your expense? You think there might be a connection, but so far, no one in Washington has thought to really press that point because they're still upset about Trump. They're still talking about Trump and his crimes. Watch Joe Biden from this past September explain why he supported the DOJ raid on Mar-a-Lago, and here's a hint, because it's "totally irresponsible" for government officials to keep classified documents after leaving office.
SCOTT PELLEY: When you saw the photograph of the top-secret documents laid out on the floor at Mar-a-Lago, what did you think to yourself, looking at that image?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: How that could possibly happen. How one — anyone could be that irresponsible. And I thought: what data was in there that may compromise sources and methods? By that I mean names of people who helped, etc., and it's just totally irresponsible.
TRUMP QUESTIONS WHEN FBI WILL RAID BIDEN HOMES TO LOOK FOR MORE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
So, they seem like hypocrites. We could play an endless loop of clips like that for the rest of the hour. You get the point, but they're not actually hypocrites. What they're describing is a caste system, when they can do what they want and you are subject to the minutia of their legal code. It's called anarcho-tyranny, but on to more enduring questions because we know that already. What is this Penn Biden Center? The Penn Biden Center? What's the purpose of the Penn Biden Center?
Well, in April of 2016, one of Hunter Biden's business associates explained the purpose in an email to Hunter. He said that the Penn Biden Center "operates like the Clinton Global Initiative without the money raise." Oh, so all the upside, none of the downside, without the money raised, really? So, you don't have to fly around the world raising money, but as the Washington Free Beacon has reported, actually, there was a lot of money being raised and it was being raised by the University of Pennsylvania and it was being raised from foreign governments after the Biden Center opened. See the connection here?
We're quoting from the piece: "Foreign contributions to the University of Pennsylvania tripled since the Penn Biden Center's soft opening in March 2017, rising from $31 million in 2016 to over $100 million in 2019." Now, where did all that money come from? Where do you think? The largest foreign contributor was China and if you go to the web page for the Penn Biden Center, you get some idea of what that money bought. On the site, there's a section called "Addressing Threats to the Liberal International Order." Russia and Vladimir Putin are mentioned as threats to the liberal international order, but China, which is currently committing genocide, is conspicuously not mentioned as a threat to the liberal international order. So, all of this aroused our suspicions naturally.
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We decided to get a closer look at the University of Pennsylvania and its ties to China. We took a look at text messages from Hunter Biden's laptop to see if we could find an answer and we found messages between a senior professor at Penn's International Relations Department to Naomi Biden. That would be Hunter Biden's very young daughter. The message from the professor begins this way: "Dear Naomi… I'm writing to you tonight to invite you to take part in a major conference in China at the end of March. I've been asked… to help recruit a prominent young leader. They" — the Chinese government — "will fly you business class and of course provide all your accommodations… I don't think it would surprise you that they are interested in you thanks to your family name. I would not take offense at that. It is truly the Chinese way (and frankly, better you than that dolt Tiffany Trump). If you are interested, can you send me your c.v. and/or a bio? I would forward that and you could expect an official invitation from Li Baodong, the secretary general of the forum."
Pretty remarkable — as far as we know, that has not been previously reported. Here you have an employee of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, sending an invitation apparently on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party to recruit Joe Biden's granddaughter for an influence operation, saying that she'd be flown to Beijing and stay in Chinese government-controlled accommodations. So, a lot of people on television seem very concerned about national security at the moment. All these former CIA and NSA and FBI employees are going on CNN and MSNBC to tell you national security implications are first in mind. Are they concerned about this? Will they ask a single question about it? Of course, they won't. So tonight, we're going to begin by asking fact-based questions about those classified materials that Joe Biden apparently had at the Penn Biden Center and what they tell us.
