Ex-Biden aide says she had no idea classified docs were in office files
Then Vice President Joe Biden’s former executive assistant, Kathy Chung, told the House Oversight Committee that she was unaware there were classified documents among the belongings she packed.
CNN reported on Wednesday about the contents of Chung’s interview with the GOP-led committee, where Chung told lawmakers she hadn’t noticed any secret-marked documents when she unpacked boxes to move Biden into his Penn Biden Center office.
Chung testified that she did not look closely at Biden’s belongings, which also included family photos, policy papers and challenge coins, she said.
Secret documents were also found in Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, prompting a federal investigation and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Hur, who is leading a criminal investigation into the matter.
Chung spoke to federal prosecutors in January, CNN said, before Attorney General Merrick named Garland Hur.
Former executive assistant to President Joe Biden Kathy Chung told the House Oversight Committee she was unaware there were classified documents among the belongings she packed into his vice presidential office
Chung voluntarily spoke to the House Oversight Committee and explained how she packed the vice president’s office and then unpacked some of the contents in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. (pictured)
Former Republican President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence are also being investigated for classified documents found at their homes after they left office.
Chung’s testimony supports Biden’s claim that he was “surprised” by the discovery of classified documents in his office at the Penn Biden Center.
More documents were later found at his home in Wilmington, where he still spends practically every weekend.
“My Corvette is in a locked garage, okay? So it’s not like they’re on the street,” Biden offered in January. “People know I take classified documents and classified materials seriously.”
In her testimony, Chung described the task of packing Biden’s vice presidential office during the transition to the Trump-Pence administration.
Secret documents were also found in Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware
While holding a security clearance during her time in the Obama-Biden administration, Chung told lawmakers she believed any classified material or documents that were supposed to be collected through the President Records Act had been removed from Biden’s office by the time she was packing it.
She testified that she failed to double-check the contents when she loaded file folders into the 13 or so boxes that ended up at the Penn Biden Center.
When asked why she said ‘we didn’t have time or didn’t think we should search them’.
“We were just told to pack,” she added, according to CNN.
In her interview with lawmakers, she explained that some of Biden’s belongings had been unpacked, while other files had been put away.
“Well, there were — like those boxes of the Cancer Moonshot and some policy papers, I knew that. You know, we unpacked that one,’ she said. “And we also unpacked a few boxes of — you know, the vice president likes pictures of his family, so to make his office look nice, we unpacked and put it up.”
“So it wasn’t just all the documents,” she said.
When asked if she studied every file she decided to unpack, Chung replied “barely.”
“We just took the file folder out of the boxes and put it in the closet,” she said.
Chung was also forced to tell lawmakers that she had no relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, nor that anyone in the Biden family was involved in packing boxes or instructed her what to pack.
Chung has been the target of a racist conspiracy theory suggesting she has ties to China because of her ethnicity.
On the political right, another story surfaced that she was chosen by Hunter Biden to move boxes of classified materials.
Chung’s full transcript has not been made public.
On Wednesday, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, the leading member of the Oversight Committee, demanded it see the light amid concerns that Republicans have deliberately “misrepresented the voluntarily transcribed interview.”
“Since the start of their investigation into then-Vice President Biden’s handling of classified documents, the Committee’s Republicans have spread false claims and racist innuendos to divert attention from their unwillingness to denounce the misuse of and refusal to of former President Trump to turn over hundreds of classified documents kept at his march. -a-Lago Club,” Raskin said in a statement Wednesday.