The long and winding document trail that carries classified documents from Joe Biden’s vice presidential office to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, DC and now back into the hands of the government includes yet another stop: a temporary facility in the nation’s capital, a source told .
The documents were moved in the summer of 2017 after he spent about six months in a government interim office near the White House after Biden left the vice presidency.
The space in DC’s Chinatown neighborhood was overseen by the Penn Biden Center while its prized location near the Capitol was prepared. The office had its official opening in 2018, which Biden attended.
“Everything was just moved en masse to temporary spaces and then moved to Penn Biden,” the person told .
President Joe Biden said Thursday he had no regrets when asked about classified documents discovered at his former office and home in Wilmington. A source says the documents were moved from a temporary office to a temporary room in 2017 before making their way to the
The new location adds an additional address to the multi-stop route for the classified documents, which ended up in a locked cabinet at the Penn Biden Center where they were discovered – while also raising new questions about the entire universe of people who may have had access to the documents over a period of years.
Those involved in the process included Biden’s former employees, General Services Administration employees, and employees at the think tank, an entity that would later fill roles for senior staffers who remained in Biden’s orbit, including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as the executive director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
The woman who oversaw the packaging and shipping of Biden’s documents in 2017 was former administrative assistant Kathy Chung, who secured the position with a well-placed recommendation from Hunter Biden, who touted her skills to his father.
“Hunter Biden recommended it. They worked together at the Department of Commerce years ago,’ the person said. Hunter informed her of the opportunity, asked her if she was interested and found out she was.
“He spoke to her father about her,” the person said. So does former Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden associate who is one of the trio of Democratic senators she had worked for in the past.
Hunter Biden served at the agency under Secretary William Daley at the end of the Clinton Administration from 1998 to 2001, after beginning a career in law and lobbying at a bank.
Then as now, in many ways he had his father’s ear.
A Biden attorney discovered documents marked “secret” while vacating Biden’s old office at the Penn Biden Center near the Capitol. The discovery would spark the events that led to the appointment of a special counsel
At least a few documents were found in Biden’s garage at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden’s sons Beau and Hunter converted the car for him
Chung was the first person publicly identified as having met federal investigators on the matter. She spoke with the office of US Attorney John Lausch before AG Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to oversee the document investigation.
Officials who worked with Biden at the time and remain associated with him are senior advisers Steve Richetti and Kate Bedingfield, and senior adviser Mike Donilon.
The former assistant helped oversee the packing of files during the busy end of Biden’s second term as vice president. That was a time when Biden saw brisk activity even in his final days in office. It required his office to function even when things were put away for safekeeping.
There is no indication that Chung knew the document boxes also contained documents marked as classified, which Biden attorney Patrick Moore discovered when he vacated Biden’s former DC office in November.
“She helped pack the contents of the vice president’s office, including the documents, and was responsible for getting them into the interim office,” said the person who said Chung was “responsible” for the move. “She just didn’t know the contents of every box that was being moved.”
Intermingled with alleged 10 government documents, some marked “top secret,” were the contents of desks and cabinets from Biden’s old office, papers related to the funeral of late son Beau Biden, and a document related to home repairs at Biden Wilmington home – a page which itself appeared to contain additional classified material.
The GSA previously confirmed that Biden’s team vacated his interim office in July 2017 as the documents began the next leg of their journey, heading southeast across the city. The Penn Biden Center did not respond to a request for comment on exactly how long the boxes of supplies remained at the Chinatown site and who had access to them.
The discovery of the documents has posed an immediate political problem for Biden, who said Thursday he had “no regrets” about the situation and berated reporters for asking him about it while touring the devastation in California.
“There isn’t one,” he said. In addition to the special counsel, investigators from the House of GOP have already begun sending out requests for information.
Hunter Biden’s role was previously identified in emails found on his infamous laptop.
“Thank you for calling and thinking of me,” Chung wrote to Hunter in May 2012, according to Fox News, after being suggested for the job when her predecessor, Michelle Smith, left.
“After the initial shock of taking in what you said…how could I miss an opportunity to work for the Vice President of the United States!!!!”
As reported this week, a newly emerged photo from the laptop appears to show the president’s son driving the classic Corvette Stingray outside the same Wilmington home where the car – and documents marked “secret” – were stored.
At the White House on Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that Biden and his team were working with investigators after alerting the National Archives following the discovery of classified material. She again declined further comment, even to specify what Biden was referring to when he said he had no regrets and referred the matter to the Justice Department.
Another set of documents spent time at Biden’s Wilmington home. This weekend, Biden opts for a winter getaway to his beach house rather than returning to the scene where lawyers uncovered more documents days ago