Whew!

I'm astonished at how quickly, during a holiday weekend, the Biden classified documents story has metastasized -- and that following the Christmas holiday break, from which reporters had already been reluctant to resume even the token appearance of doing work. Several commentators, even on the normally obtuse and lackadaisical right, have made worthwhile points. Bonchie at Red State notes,

After initially framing the incident as a one-off resulting from hurried packing after Biden’s vice presidency, more documents were “found” in the president’s garage at his Delaware residence. Then, weeks later, yet another document was found in an adjacent room.

In reality, almost all of this had already taken place by the time the public was informed, with the second batch of documents being secretly reported to the DOJ on December 20th, 2022.

. . . Perhaps it was all over? Surely, Biden could blame the illegal possession of all those classified documents on careless staffers who “accidentally” swept up SCI material into packing boxes. Of course, SCI material isn’t supposed to ever legally leave a SCIF, so how it even got to Biden’s vice presidential office is an issue, but hey, details, right? And yeah, the documents ended up separated out into three different unsecured locations, clearly having been moved multiple times.

. . . Of course, on Saturday, that narrative took another beating with the discovery of a fourth trove of classified documents. This time, they were found in Biden’s filing cabinet at his home office. To say that it belabors belief that they ended up there without the president’s knowledge is to severely understate the situation.

He then moves to a related queation, although I'm not sure he recognizes all the implications:

Yet, somehow, as big of a scandal as the possession of those classified documents is, they’ve actually served as a useful tool in revealing a possibly bigger scandal. Namely, how the Biden family garners and handles money. For example, isn’t it a little concerning that Joe Biden was paid nearly $1,000,000 as part of the Penn Biden Center, a university arm that allegedly received $61 million from the Chinese? Given he never actually taught a class, what exactly was he getting paid to do?

I noted on Friday that the Penn Biden Center looks to have been a major operation, a very well-funded administration-in-exile that not only paid Biden himself handsomely, but hired at least 10 people who became high-level administration figures after the 2020 election, inclulding Secretary of State Blinken and and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Where did all this money come from? Bonchie goes on,

Things get a lot worse when Hunter Biden enters the picture, and with this classified documents scandal, he has now entered the picture like the Kool-Aid man.

He links to a tweet from Miranda Devine citing a form on which Hunter claimed to live at the Biden Wilmington residence where some of the classified documents were found.

But when you look at the form, things go from bad to worse.

For some reason, Hunter Biden claimed that he was paying $49,910 in rent for Joe Biden’s Delaware residence. The house itself is only worth $2,000,000 in today’s market (and was built for a fraction of that). Why was Hunter Biden paying $49,910 in rent to his father? Where did all that money go?

But I think it's important to go back to one of my Friday points, that much of this had been anticipated by Biden operatives last spring, when the White House brought Richard Sauber over as special counsel for the specific purpose of scrubbing Biden's Penn Biden and home offices. The best we can say is that although Sauber had uncovered a few things by last November, he didn't get nearly as much as he should have. And indeed, what must clearly have been a Biden decision to approve a raid on Mar-a-Lago for Trump's classified documents looks especially incongruous in light of the fact that Biden had tasked Sauber to scrub just such material from his own home and previous workplaces.

Of course, had Sauber been able to do that before the August raid on Mar-a-Lago, noody would have been the wiser, but all those pesky documents have been turning up over the months since the Mar-a-Lago raid. And now that Attorney General Garland has announced a special prosecutor for the Biden documents, Biden has had to engage a personal attorney to handle the case.

President Joe Biden has hired Democrat lawyer Bob Bauer to represent him in the ongoing special counsel investigation over classified documents found in his possession at his home and at a private office in Washington, DC.

Ed Morrissey makes the worthwhile point at Hot Air:

Either [Special Counsel Sauber's team] incompetently conducted their initial searches of Biden properties and offices, or they didn’t actually complete them at all.

I like to study incompetence, wherever we find it. I think this will be an especially delicious example. This may well end Sauber's career. Morrissey goes on,

This raises another question, too. The spread of these materials in the Wilmington home makes it clear that someone was making use of them at some point. Otherwise, the classified material would have remained in the boxes in which they were initially packaged from Biden’s vice-presidential term. That’s not “inadvertently misplacing” material, but intentional retention and unauthorized uses of classified material.

And that makes the obvious questions even more acute. What did the classified information contain, and what was Biden’s interest in it? Who else accessed this material, and for what purpose? How much more is there to find?

That reporters are working on this over a holiday weekend suggests they think careers are to be made from it. So far, what we've been learning has been the result of overall incompetence, starting with how Biden's post-vice presidential operation was run, extending to the incompetent effort to clean up that mess once he was in the White House. As they say, handsome is as handsome does.