Biden’s counsel has insisted that this is merely “inadvertently misplaced.” That statement is belied by a couple of facts. First, it seems that these documents were likely moved more than once. Biden left office as vice president in 2017. He presumably took these documents at that time. However, they ended up in different places, including one document found separately from the “garage files” in the residence.
Moreover, Biden had an office at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia after finishing his term in 2017. On February 8, 2018, the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement says that it opened its doors in Washington, D.C.
Biden could not have moved into the D.C. office until later that year. So those documents had to be moved from another location with moving trucks and personnel. They then sat in the office for years as other classified documents sat in his garage with his Corvette.
At some point, some documents were sent to the office and some to the residence and garage. What explained this division if it was not based on what the then vice president was working on?
[Let’s not forget that it’s still an open question whether a sitting VP had a need to access any of these materials in the first place. What was the original “need to know” that prompted Biden not just to access those materials but to take possession of them? And then, how did Biden commingle those documents with unclassified material, which is supposed to be stored separately, and then take all of them out of his office in January 2017 when his VP term ended? The “inadvertently misplaced” defense has a lot of holes. — Ed]
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