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The Biden Papers

The Biden Papers
Politically “sensitive” information on Joe and Hunter Biden remains off-limits to the public.
By Lloyd Billingsley

Back on August 8, the FBI committed the first home invasion of a former president, seizing Donald Trump’s passport and probing Melania Trump’s clothing. While FBI bosses comb through the Trump documents, Joe Biden’s Senate papers remain locked up at the University of Delaware.

In 2010, as Fox News reports, vice-president Biden expressed concern that “political sensitivities” could arise from releasing the papers. Biden associate counsel Katherine Oyama emailed Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner Eric Schwerin that the vice president and the White House “will have strong views on some of these items, especially those related to the timing and scope of any public release.” Similar concerns arose in the spring of 2020.

After Tara Reade accused Biden of sexual assault, the Delaware Democrat made a public request for a search of Senate records from 1993 for the alleged complaint. Senate secretary Julie Adams proclaimed that “disclosing the existence of such specific records would amount to a prohibited disclosure under the Government Employee Rights Act of 1991. Furthermore, we are not aware of any exceptions in law authorizing our office to disclose any such records that do exist, if any, even to original participants in a matter.”

That left the Senate records Biden deeded to the University of Delaware. Biden initially claimed his Senate papers would lead to deeper understanding and UD officials said the materials would illuminate decades of U.S policy and diplomacy and the vice president’s critical role in its development. That changed after Reade came forward.

Biden told reporters the papers were irrelevant to her accusation, and the files were closed to the public without “express consent” from Biden. The University of Delaware claimed a provision in state law exempts the school from requests not related to “public funds.” The records had not been digitized, UD bosses claimed, so there was no way to search the archive.

Joe Biden’s Senate records were supposed to be available to the public two years after Biden’s last day in elected office. That changed in April, 2019, when Joe Biden once again threw his hat in the ring for president. The UD quickly changed the release to the end of 2019 or two years after Biden retired from public life.

Biden claimed the materials could be “taken out of context” or used as “fodder” against his run for president. The documents remained inaccessible, even in the face of FOIA requests. Biden claimed the incident with Reade “never, never happened,” and the Hunter Biden back story escaped notice.

Before July, the University of Delaware chairman of the board was John Cochran, serving since 2015. Cochran is a Biden donor and former CEO of MBNA, a Delaware credit card company, at the time the second-largest issuer of Visa and Mastercards in the nation. Cochran showed up in “The Senator from MBNA,” by Byron York, in the January 1998 American Spectator.

Sen. Biden was strapped for cash and Cochran paid top dollar for Biden’s house, with additional benefits for the Senator. As York explained, “MBNA’s top executives contributed generously to his campaign in a series of coordinated donations that sidestepped the limits on contributions by the company’s political action committee.”

During the 1996 senatorial race, MBNA became Biden’s biggest single source of contributions. A few weeks after Biden was re-elected, MBNA hired Joe Biden’s son Hunter, “a talented young guy that we are grooming for a management position.” What, exactly, Hunter would do they wouldn’t say.

In October of 2010, Hunter Biden’s post with MBNA failed to show up in a massive October, Atlantic essay on Joe Biden headlined “The Salesman.” Appropriately enough, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden dished up the ad copy.

“Joe Biden doesn’t just meet you, he engulfs you,” Bowden wrote, “There’s the direct contact with his blue eyes, the firm handshake while his other hand grasps your arm, the flash of those famously perfect white teeth, and an immediate frontal assault on your personal space. He shoulders right through the aura of fame and high office.” And so on. Nothing about MBNA, Hunter Biden’s job, and shady campaign contributions in 1996.

Also in 2010, Biden lawyers notified Hunter’s business partner Eric Schwerin about political sensitivities that could arise from Joe Biden’s Senate papers at the University of Delaware. In 2020, Hunter Biden’s laptop hit the news with “a trove of emails, text messages, photos and financial documents between Hunter Biden, his family and business associates — detailing how the president’s son used his political leverage in his overseas business dealings.”

The laptop came into the hands of the FBI, the story was suppressed on social media, and 51 intelligence community veterans called it “Russian disinformation.” The intel vets included former CIA boss John Brennan, who in 1976 voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall of the Communist Party USA, and never should have been hired in first place.

The FBI is rather quiet about the laptop and has conducted no surprise raids on Hunter Biden’s residence to seize documents. By all appearances, the FBI limits such tactics to a single former president.

Joe’s Biden’s Senate papers, once flagged as a concern about Hunter, with possible information about the Reade accusation, are locked up tighter than a bathysphere until two years after Biden retires from public life. In the meantime, the plagiarist, prevaricator and “salesman” with the blue eyes and “famously perfect white teeth” remains above the law.

Original Article

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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