Classified documents found in Biden’s old office

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Settle, petal.
No need to get personal.

This was explained by a trusted biased right-wing source.
The tax system, in this regard, is similar to how it is done in Australia.

Trump claiming losses for tax reduction purposes is old mainstream news.

You skipped most of my post, didn't you?

I should have known that sentence would end your read, but my snarky side just couldn't resist. If you'd read on, I basically admit that. And then provide more suitable information. I guess I should have edited out my snark, but ...

Maybe read the rest before commenting.

The Justice Department has searched President Biden's home in Delaware and located six documents containing classification markings and also took possession of some of his notes, the president's lawyer said Saturday.

Bob Bauer, a lawyer for the president, said the Justice Department conducted the search at Mr. Biden's Wilmington residence on Friday. He said it lasted about 13 hours.

The Justice Department "took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President's service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President," Bauer said in a statement.

The prosecutors also "took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years," he said.

In a separate statement, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, said that the "DOJ conducted a comprehensive search of the president's Wilmington residence, and it concluded late Friday night."

"Neither the President nor the First Lady were present during the search," Sauber added.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Fitzpatrick told CBS News in a statement that the "FBI executed a planned, consensual search of the president's residence in Wilmington."

Mr. Biden told reporters in California Thursday that he "has no regrets" about the handling of the documents that had been discovered. When asked why the White House didn't disclose the existence of the documents in November, before the midterm elections, he told reporters he thinks they're going to find out "there's no there there."

"We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place," Mr. Biden said. "We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department. We're fully cooperating, looking forward to getting this resolved quickly. I think you're gonna find there's nothing there. I have no regrets. I'm following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. That's exactly what we're doing. There's no there there."

The decision by President Joe Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Biden or his presidency.

The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate.

In fact, the Biden strategy was profoundly influenced by the Trump case, in which the former president refused to turn over all the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The goal for the Biden team, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, was to win the trust of Justice Department investigators and demonstrate that the president and his team were cooperating fully. In other words, they would head off any serious legal repercussions by doing exactly the opposite of what the Biden lawyers had seen the Trump legal team do.

In the short term, at least, the bet seems to have backfired. Biden’s silence while cooperating with investigators did not forestall the appointment of a special counsel, as his aides had hoped, but still resulted in a public uproar once it became clear that the White House had hidden the situation from the public for more than two months. Biden’s advisers still hope that the trust they believe they have engendered with investigators by not litigating the matter in public may yet pay off in the long run, by convincing the special counsel that nothing nefarious took place.

In the meantime, though, the strategy has left Biden open to withering criticism for concealing the discovery for so long. And now, after a productive year that had seemed to leave the president in a strong position to announce a reelection campaign, the handling of the documents case has eroded his capacity to claim the high road against Trump, while also raising questions about his team’s ability to navigate Republican attacks from Capitol Hill.

The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president’s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation.

Eventually, the circle widened slightly, but the matter remained closely held, and the idea of preemptively making the discoveries public does not seem to have been seriously considered. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that neither she nor her staff were involved in crafting the strategy of when to disclose the development.

Still, officials have said there was no hesitation when it came to quickly informing officials at the National Archives and Records Administration, which is responsible for securing such documents. The president’s legal responsibility was clear, and his lawyers had no intention of fighting with the archivists the way Trump and his advisers had done for months after leaving office in 2021.

Informing the public was a different matter, with different risks. Biden had long promised that he would never politicize the Justice Department like his predecessor had done repeatedly. In recent days, White House officials have said they have resisted the urge to provide more information about the documents because they do not want to look like they are putting their thumb on the scale in an investigation centered on the president and his top aides.

We understand that there’s a tension between the need to be cooperative with an ongoing DOJ investigation, and rightful demands for additional public information,” said Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office. “And so we’re trying to strike that balance and being as clear as we can.”

But the result has been ugly sessions in the White House briefing room as Jean-Pierre has been pummeled day after day for refusing to provide answers. All of which has led to second-guessing among Democrats and even within the West Wing. Some in the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the disciplined way that the president and his inner circle withhold information, sharing it only on a need-to-know basis in almost all cases, has hurt Biden in a situation where officials had the option to be proactive.

The choice to keep silent for so long exacerbated the political damage when the news finally leaked out on Jan. 9. The days that followed, with a series of rolling disclosures and misstatements by the president’s public relations team, cemented the impression that Biden had not been forthcoming.

Since the Biden documents were found last fall, there has been no lack of private communication between the White House and the Justice Department.

Starting on Nov. 10, just one day after Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to look into the matter, the president’s counselors were in “regular contact,” as Bauer said in a statement, with their counterparts at the Justice Department.

In a letter to Bauer in mid-November, a senior Justice Department official outlined next steps: They would need permission to review the documents found at the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located just minutes from the Capitol and the White House. The letter, first revealed by The Washington Post this week, also indicated the need to search other locations where similar documents might be found.

The quiet cooperation continued for weeks, even up to the moment that Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate the matter last week. Moments before Garland spoke, Bauer called the department to inform them that another page of classified information had been found.

It was a classic legal strategy by Biden and his top aides — cooperate fully with investigators in the hopes of giving them no reason to suspect ill intent. But it laid bare a common challenge for people working in the West Wing: The advice offered by a president’s lawyers often does not make for the best public relations strategy.

Such tensions are common in politically charged investigations. Former President Bill Clinton’s political and communications advisers regularly lashed out at his lawyers for withholding information from them about Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern. Lawyers for Trump often begged him not to tweet about the legal cases against him, for fear of antagonizing prosecutors.

In Biden’s case, advisers thought that the very act of publicizing the discovery of the documents would create a political furor that would make the appointment of a special counsel unavoidable. They reasoned that the discovery of documents long after leaving office was not that unusual and, as long as there was no intent to violate rules on classified papers, was generally handled without conflict, so the only thing that would create legal exposure would be drawing public attention to it.

Details about the documents — where they were found, what they are about, where they came from — remain elusive more than 10 days after their existence was first made public by CBS News.

The White House has refused to explain why it took nearly six weeks after the initial discovery of documents to search the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, where a second batch was found on Dec. 20. And it has not said why personal lawyers for the president who do not have security clearances were the ones conducting the searches, but people close to the case said that was done with the approval of the Justice Department.

Advisers have said there was no sense of urgency at first to search the Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, homes because the Secret Service guards both of them and therefore any sensitive documents that might be there would be safe. They did not think they would find any documents in either place, an assumption that turned out to be right about the beach house and wrong about the Wilmington one, where papers were found in the garage and a nearby room.

Once the discovery of the original batch of documents was revealed, Dunn was adamant that the White House should keep the public information flow to a trickle and focus instead on how different Biden’s case was from the broader investigation into his predecessor, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Dunn also stressed the need to underscore the differences between Biden’s cooperation with the archives and Justice Department and Trump’s defiance.

White House officials are suspicious of the leaks that made the case public, thinking that it was meant to drive the very outcome that has taken place. But they also have concluded that the public sees Biden and Trump very differently. They say Biden draws on a decadeslong reputation for integrity and honesty while Trump is seen by many as having lied frequently throughout his tenure in office.

Still, current and former White House officials said Biden’s aides focused too much on making that comparison and not enough on ensuring that all the relevant facts were revealed all at once.

Senior Justice Department officials were surprised the White House had not released a detailed timeline of the discovery of the caches before Garland announced Hur’s appointment last week, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

n announcing Hur’s selection, Garland, who seldom discusses prosecutorial moves not previously disclosed in court filings, offered his own detailed timeline of the department’s involvement in the case, revealing for the first time that the second batch of classified material had been discovered by Biden’s team on Dec. 20, weeks after the first.

That left the Justice Department in the position of appearing more transparent about the matter than the White House. For the president’s team, that brought immediate blowback as reporters pressed for more answers and Republicans accused the White House of a cover-up.

But to Biden’s lawyers, the gamble is not over yet. If their strategy ultimately leads to the case being resolved without charges, they reason, then the short-term pain will be worth it — a bet with a lot riding on it.

The Justice Department searched Biden's home and recovered 6 more classified documents
Story by [email protected] (Lloyd Lee) • 8h ago

Joe Biden called out for saying he had 'no regrets' about how he acted when classified documents were found in Delaware home

The leader of the free world has been criticised for his response to questions about the handling of classified documents as he toured California to assess damage from wild storms.
David Wu

January 21, 2023

United States President Joe Biden has "no regrets" in the way he handled the discovery of classified documents inside his Delaware home.

The White House announced last Thursday a "small number" of secret materials from his time as Barack Obama's vice president was discovered in his garage.

"During the review, the lawyers discovered among personal and political papers a small number of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings," the President's special counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement.

Days earlier it was revealed the first batch of government documents were found at the Penn Biden Centre for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in November 2022.

Notebooks that President Joe Biden wrote in during his time as vice president are among the items the FBI took from one of his Delaware homes during a search there last week, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The notebooks were seized because Biden’s writings on some of the pages relate to his official business as vice president, including details of his diplomatic engagements during the Obama administration, and may reference classified information, this person said. They said the notebooks do not have classified markings on them, but some of the handwritten notes inside of them could be considered as such given their sensitive content.

Other pages in the notebooks, while they may not contain potentially classified information, could still be considered government property under the Presidential Records Act because they pertain to official business Biden conducted as vice president, the person familiar with the investigation said.

The notebooks include a mix of handwritten notes from Biden on various topics, both personal and official, this person said. On some pages Biden wrote down things about his family or his life unrelated to public office, they said. On other pages, they said he memorialized in writing some of his experiences or thoughts as vice president at the time.

The number of notebooks Biden kept is large, according to the person familiar with the investigation, but they did not know the precise number.

Bauer’s spokesperson on Friday declined to comment when asked whether Biden knew the notebooks were packed in boxes that left with him at the end of the Obama administration, if he’s accessed them since leaving the vice presidency and whether he thought the notebooks were his personal property.

In a letter this week to former presidents and vice presidents, the National Archives requested their offices search for any materials in their possession that might relate to their tenures in office, including “to determine whether bodies of materials previously assumed to be personal in nature might inadvertently contain presidential or vice presidential records subject to the [Presidential Records Act], whether classified or unclassified.”

Classified documents and Hunter scandal is ‘the absolute end’ for Biden’s 2024 bid
January 30, 2023 - 1:22PM

Joe Biden’s hoarded classified document saga and the predicted House investigation into his son Hunter will be the “absolute end” for the president’s potential 2024 re-election campaign, according to former Clinton adviser Dick Morris.

National Archives blocked from revealing Biden classified docs find by WH or DOJ: source

The National Archives was blocked from informing the public about the initial discovery of classified documents at President Biden’s former DC think tank by either the White House or the Department of Justice, The Post has learned.

The shocking revelation, confirmed by a source familiar with the matter, has led to allegations of a double standard in how the National Archives and Records Administration and the Justice Department are prosecuting the investigations of Biden and of former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling America’s secrets.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) revealed on Tuesday that Archives general counsel Gary Stern, in a closed-door interview, said he could not tell lawmakers who had ordered the Archives to keep quiet and not put out a press release announcing the Nov. 2 find at the Penn Biden Center.

“There are only two people that could have given those orders, and that’s either the Department of Justice with [Attorney General] Merrick Garland or the White House with Joe Biden,” Comer told Fox News’ “Hannity.”

“So it shows right there that this Department of Justice and this White House is interfering with this,” he added.

Just heard on the radio this morning that the FBI found no incriminating evidence in Biden's office and that unlike a certain orange haired former POTUS, Biden had fully cooperated with their investigation.

Must be terribly disappointing for the MAGAs that they still can't find a single shred of dirt on Biden or his son.

A former aide to President Biden told House investigators how boxes that were later found to contain classified documents ended up in Mr. Biden's former private office, according to snippets of testimony released by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Kathy Chung, Mr. Biden's former assistant, gave a voluntary, transcribed interview to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on April 4. She testified that she and another aide packed up the outgoing vice president's office at the end of the Obama administration, placing folders and other items in boxes. Those boxes were then taken to a government transition facility before eventually ending up at the offices of the Penn Biden Center in Washington, a think tank run by the University of Pennsylvania where Mr. Biden kept an office, Chung testified.

The committee's chairman, Rep. James Comer, launched an investigation after documents marked as classified were found in Mr. Biden's office and Delaware home last fall and earlier this year. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland, released excerpts of Chung's testimony on Wednesday.

According to a partial transcript from Democratic staff on the committee, Chung testified that she and another Biden assistant, Ann Marie Person, worked quickly to help pack up the vice presidential office before Donald Trump took office. She testified that she didn't notice any classified material at any point in the process. Chung said she had a security clearance and experience handling classified material while she was in the vice president's office.

Chung said she packed about 13 boxes at the White House, at the time believing that all presidential and classified material had already been turned over to the appropriate offices. She said she placed folders in the boxes and did not examine the papers inside the folders. They also packed boxes with items such as challenge coins, personal correspondence, condolence letters, schedule copies, copies of past speeches and some other photos and documents.

The boxes, Chung said, were taken to a General Services Administration transition facility near the White House, where they stayed for six months. They were then moved to a building in Washington's Chinatown neighborhood that was leased by the Penn Biden Center before eventually being moved to the think tank's main office space.

Chung, who was a Penn Biden Center employee at the time, said she unpacked the boxes at Mr. Biden's Penn Biden Center office, placing some of the file folders in a cabinet. She testified that she didn't rifle through the papers individually as she unpacked.

She said she received a call in May 2022 from the White House counsel at the time, Dana Remus, who asked Chung to help re-pack the boxes at the Penn Biden Center. She said she did so. It wasn't until November 2022 that Bob Bauer, the president's personal attorney, called her to tell her classified material was found in the boxes she had packed, according to her testimony.

It's not clear what happened between the May 2022 phone call from Remus and November 2022 when the documents were discovered. The White House declined to comment on Chung's testimony.

WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Hur has declined to prosecute President Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents, but said Biden's practices "present serious risks to national security," and added that Biden portrayed himself as an "elderly man with a poor memory" who would be sympathetic to a jury.

"Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen," the report said, but the evidence "does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

About a month after he left office as vice president, in a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in February 2017, Biden remarked that he “just found all this classified stuff downstairs," the report said. Biden was believed to have been referencing classified documents about the Afghanistan troop surge in 2009, which Biden opposed.

Bidens’ memory, Hur’s report said, “was significantly limited” during his 2023 interviews with the special counsel.

"We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," it said. "Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."

Hur’s report said there were “clear” material distinctions between a potential case against Biden and the pending case against Trump, noting that unlike “the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts."

Most notably, they wrote, "after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite." On the other hand, they wrote, "Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation."

Hur's report does explain at length where the facts of the Biden investigation are similar to the charges brought against Trump.

"For all of the classified materials recovered during this investigation, after the vice presidency, Mr. Biden did not receive a written waiver of the need-to-know requirement, and no agency official made the findings required by the executive order," the report states.

President Biden on Thursday night angrily disputed some of the findings in special counsel Robert Hur's report on his investigation into the president's handling of classified material from his time as vice president, taking particular issue with the report's comments about his memory.

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden said he was "pleased" the special counsel's report concluded no charges were warranted and pointed to several passages in the report that explicitly said the president did not "willfully retain" classified documents.

But in a contentious exchange with a reporter after his prepared remarks, Mr. Biden pushed back on the special counsel's assertion that he had shared classified information with his ghostwriter.

According to the report, Mr. Biden took notes, some of which were "related to classified subjects including the President's Daily Brief and National Security Council meetings" while he served as vice president. Those notebooks were kept in his Virginia and Delaware homes, and Mr. Biden used them as reference material for his 2017 memoir "Promise Me, Dad," sharing contents with his ghostwriter.

"Mr. Biden shared information, including some classified information, from these notebooks with his ghostwriter," the report said, adding the ghostwriter deleted audio recordings related to the memoir after the special counsel was appointed.

"The recordings had significant evidentiary value," the report said. But the FBI was able to recover the deleted files from the ghostwriter's computer. The government considered charging the ghostwriter with obstruction but ultimately decided against it based on their findings.

Mr. Biden on Thursday said he never shared classified information with the ghostwriter.

"I guarantee you, I did not," Mr. Biden said.

"I had written a long memorandum to President Obama, why we should not be in Afghanistan, multiple pages," the president said. "And so what I was referring to, I said classified, what I should have said, it was, it should be private, because it was a contact between the president and the vice president."

"It was not classified information in that document," Mr. Biden insisted. "That was not classified."

Mr. Biden also addressed the report's assertions that he had trouble recalling basic facts like what years he served as vice president and when his son, Beau Biden, died.

"How in the hell dare he raise that," Mr. Biden said. "Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn't any of their damn business."

Mr. Biden said he has worn a rosary on his wrist every day since his son died, although he appeared to struggle to complete the name of the church from which the rosary came. The president also said his family holds a memorial for his son every year.

"I don't need anyone to remind me when he passed away," Mr. Biden said.

"The simple truth is, I sat for a five-hour interview over two days of events going back 40 years. At the same time, I was managing an international crisis," Mr. Biden said, referencing Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which had occurred one day before the first day of his interview with the special counsel.

Mr. Biden said the special counsel's job was to decide whether or not to bring charges, and that any other "extraneous commentary" had "no place in this report."

"The bottom line is the matter is now closed, and we can continue what I've always focused on: My job of being president of the United States of America," Mr. Biden said.

Speaking with a reporter who raised the issue of Hur's assertion a jury would find the president to be a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," Mr. Biden responded, "I'm well-meaning and I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing. I've been president and I put this country back on its feet. I don't need his recommendation."

Mr. Biden said his memory is "fine," and "has not gotten worse" over the course of his presidency.

Special counsel Robert Hur’s bombshell report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents concluded that he presented as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who was unable to remember key dates, including when he served as vice president and the year his son died.

Biden, for his part, has lambasted Hur for bringing up the topic of Beau Biden’s death, and his lawyers have criticized the report.

But the transcript of Biden’s interview, which was reviewed by NBC News, paints a more nuanced picture on both sides.

Despite the president’s assertion that Hur brought up his son’s death first, the transcript shows that it was Biden himself who did so, as NBC News has reported.

Biden, who often appeared to be thinking out loud in response to specific questions, at other points recalls in detail specific events from his time as vice president.

Biden spoke with Hur for 3½ hours Oct. 8, and for 90 minutes the next day. The timing was fraught, with a major international crisis having broken out Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israel.

Biden faced a barrage of questions from Hur and another federal prosecutor about documents he saw as vice president, where and how he stored them and why some sensitive materials remained in his possession for more than five years after he left office as vice president.

At one point, Hur acknowledged that some of the questions he would ask would “relate to events that happened years ago.” Biden joked in response: “I’m a young man, so it’s not a problem.”

According to the review of the transcript, Biden at times expanded beyond the narrow subject areas of particular questions. At one point, he described in vivid detail a 2011 visit to Mongolia, where he displayed unexpected archery skills at a cultural performance in his honor.

Biden also often said he could not recall a specific incident or why, for instance, certain items were packed in certain ways. And at times, he or his attorneys challenged the prosecutors about the relevance or accuracy of questions they posed, with Biden at one point challenging the logic of one of Hur’s lines of questioning.

The full transcript was provided to Congress on Tuesday, according to a source familiar with the matter. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., subpoenaed it and other materials related to the investigation.

Biden allies believe a full reading of the transcript will only bolster their contention that Hur’s characterization of Biden during the interview was not based in reality. If anything, they argue, Hur’s at-times meandering questioning may have contributed to the confusion.

Hur’s assessment of Biden’s mental fitness is likely to be front and center as Hur makes his first public appearance since the report was released last month, testifying Tuesday before Republican-led committees on Capitol Hill.

In his opening statement, Hur planned to defend his investigation, the final report and his treatment of Biden’s age.

“I knew that for my decision to be credible, I could not simply announce that I recommended no criminal charges and leave it at that. I needed to explain why,” Hur planned to say, according to an advance copy of his remarks.

In discussing the president’s age, Hur will say that his characterization was “necessary and accurate and fair.”

“What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe," he will say. "I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly.”

Beau Biden’s death year
Hur’s yearlong probe took him deep in the weeds of perhaps the most fraught period of Biden’s half-century in public life. Biden left office in 2017, nearly two years after he buried his son. Beau Biden’s cancer battle and the decision Biden would make later not to seek the presidency in 2016 began an unpredictable series of events that would ultimately take him back to the White House in 2021.

It was in trying to share some of that timeline that Biden, in his interview with Hur, made a mistake that Hur ultimately seized on in his report’s damning conclusion.

But even though Biden said Hur brought up the subject of his son’s death, it was, as NBC News has reported, first raised by Biden himself. Roughly midway through the first day of his interview, Hur asked Biden about where he might have stored documents related to the work he was engaged in after he left the vice presidency in 2017.

“Remember, in this timeframe, my son is — either been deployed or is dying,” Biden said.

As he continued thinking back to the period, he appeared to conflate his consideration of running in the 2016 election, in the months after Beau Biden died in 2015, with the early considerations of a 2020 bid after he left office.

“Even though I’m at Penn,” he said, referring to the Penn Biden Center, which was established after he left office, “I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again.”

Biden then asked what month his son died before quickly stating the date: May 30. The transcript indicates others present interjected to specify the year: 2015.

“And Trump got elected in November of 2017,” he said, before the transcript indicates another participant corrected him to say 2016.

“Yeah, OK. But that’s when Trump gets sworn in then,” he said, before he went into a description of the book “Promise Me, Dad,” which he would spend the next year writing, documenting the years leading up to and following his son’s death.

“This is personal,” he said.

There were other points during the two days of questioning when Biden appeared to misalign specific events to the right years. Discussing the moving of items in 2019 from a home he rented in Virginia to Delaware, he said he needed the furniture to set up a home studio to do media appearances during the coronavirus pandemic, which began a year later.

Zooming out
Those moments are likely to provide fodder for Republicans eager to further political attacks on Biden’s ability to continue serving in office. Tuesday’s hearing comes just days after Biden’s performance in the State of the Union address, which was applauded by fellow Democrats.

A full reading of the more than 250 pages of the transcripts reveals often mundane and prolonged back-and-forth discussions between Biden and the prosecutors about the ways he reviewed classified documents as vice president and how his belongings were transported among the White House, his Delaware home and other locations.

The two days of questioning had minimal breaks, with Biden often rejecting suggestions to pause the proceedings.

“I’d rather just keep going. I’ll go all night if we get this done,” he said toward the end of the first day’s session.

Biden’s lawyers at times interjected when they took issue with prosecutors’ line of questioning, with Bauer at one point telling Hur he should not “put him in a position where he has to speculate or create assumptions, or try to engage in detective work.”

“I think we’re kind of going down a trail here that I find confusing,” Bauer said at another point. “They’re obviously trying to establish something,” Biden surmised.

Biden’s careerlong work in foreign policy was evident from start to finish. The sessions began with Hur acknowledging, without specifying, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

“I know there’s a lot of other things in the world going on that demand your attention,” Hur began. “We may be interrupted by one,” Biden responded, adding he had just spoken to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden at another point described the role he played as President Barack Obama’s No. 2.

“I’d be the guy that’d basically take the heat, which I was prepared to do because I knew as much as they did,” Biden said, referring to early deliberations in the Obama administration about the future of the war in Afghanistan.

He also noted that some of the issues he was dealing with as vice president continue today. One significantly redacted part of the transcript comes in the context of Biden’s recalling meetings he held as vice president with lawmakers in connection with the Iran nuclear deal. And discussing items Justice Department officials found about Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. in 2015, Biden noted he remains in touch with Francis.

“He’s my ticket,” Biden said, before making it clear he was joking.

Lighter moments
Even amid tense discussions, Biden often found ways to lighten the mood. At several points he teased investigators about their various searches of his properties.

“I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit, which you probably did. She’s beautiful,” Biden said at one point.