More From The New Deep Throat!

The image above is W Mark Felt, the Watergate Deep Throat, from his glory days as FBI Director wannabe. As I said yesterday, it sounds like we have a new Deep Throat, apparently just as highly placed, who's beginning to leak about Biden's classified documents. So far, nobody seems to be getting the point.

The news yesterday evening was that another half-dozen classified documents had been run down in a new search of the Wilmington home, this one conducted by people from the Justice Department, not Biden's personal attorneys, after those attorneys had insisted everything had been found.

Biden’s lawyers immediately tried to get out in front of the revelation, releasing a statement claiming cooperation with the DOJ. But while the administration continues to talk about transparency, one bombshell detail from the search has left the president’s lies fully exposed. Namely, the fact that documents were found that were taken during Biden’s years in the Senate.

I just don't see a "bombshell" here. It's an indication that Biden has operated the same way for pretty much the whole time he's been in public life, but that's nothing new. What's more interesting is this story in the UK Daily Mail:

The long and winding document trail that leads classified documents from Joe Biden's vice presidential office to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. and now back into the hands of the government, includes yet another stopover: a temporary facility in the nation's capital, a source tells DailyMail.com.

"A source". We don't know if this is the same leaker who told CBS News about the November document tranche and then leaked that there'd been a deal to keep that discovery secret, but it really doesn't matter. Nobody knew who the original Deep Throat was for more than 30 years, and it was (and for that matter still is) reasonable to speculate that it may have been more than one person. Mark Felt was a narcissistic guy who'd felt underappreciated, after all; he was fully capable of claiming more credit for Watergate than he deserved. What's interesting is that somebody's leaking, not his precise identity.. Here's the substance:

The documents were moved in the summer of 2017 after spending about six months at a government transition office near the White House once 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 being readied. The office had its formal opening, attended by Biden, in 2018.

'Everything was just moved en masse to temporary space, then moved to Penn Biden,' the person told DailyMail.com.

So OK. The White House narrative continues to be that these were just piles of random stuff gathered up in a last-minute frenzy as Biden left the vice presidency, nothing to see here -- but again, that's been the story Trump's people have been telling about how his docs turned up at Mar-a-Lago, with more credibility. The main complaint from the Trump detractors has been that the National Archives should have received that material, it shouldn't even have gone to Florida, and Trump was violating the law even to try to negotiate over it.

The story continues,

The woman who oversaw the packing 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 capabilities to his father.

. . . The former assistant helped oversee the packing of files during the busy tail end of Biden's second term as VP. That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office. It required keeping his office functioning even while things were being put away for safekeeping.

Wait a moment. This is the vice presidency, an office about which no statement is more repeated than John Nance Garner’s observation that “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Of classified matters, back in the day, the Manhattan Project "was so secret that FDR did not even inform his fourth-term vice president, Truman, that it existed". But for Joe Biden, "That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office." Color me skeptical, especially given what we've learned about Obama's opinion of Biden's ability.

Whatever the flurry of last-minute activity was, my guess is that it had more to do with keeping up an income stream of baksheesh than anything to do with national business. And I'm still intrigued by all the use of terms like "transition", as in "government transition office" in the link above. We hear of a "transition team" for an incoming administration, but now we're learning of a "transition office" for a departing vice president, whom we would normally expect to be boarding a Southwest flight to fly home coach a la, say, Dan Quayle.

Not Joe Biden. He had to "transition" into a quasi-official headquarters-in-exile at the Penn Biden Center, and it's hard to avoid thinking he felt entitled to quasi-presidential perks there, including continued access to classified material. But why did all this stuff go first to a "transition office" and then, after six months, to the Penn Biden Center? Much was said about how all of Trump's White House detritus should have gone straight to the National Archives, not Mar-a-Lago, but Biden had some sort of special carveout that exempted his stuff.

That's just one queston nobody's asked. Let's just leave aside, at least for now, the whole question of how Biden seems to have been able to represent himself to putative insiders as the president-in-waiting throughout that whole four-year interregnum.