Sounds Like There's A New Deep Throat

A lot has come out over the Biden classified docs over the past few days, but nobody seems to be making much sense of it. I think the key is here:

White House officials are reportedly suspicious about how President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal was leaked to the press after only a select group of White House and Justice Department officials knew about the violation.

The plot to hide the scandal, initially designed by eight of Biden’s closest confidants with apparent approval from the Justice Department, was suddenly leaked to CBS News 68 days after Biden’s personal attorney unearthed the classified documents at the Penn Biden Center. It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

There's the whole thing in a nutshell, at least so far. The discovery of the classified docs was a byproduct of some other project that we don't know much about, except that well before any stray docs were involved, some high-priced, well-placed, highly connected lawyers were on the case. But now there's a leaker, when the whole thing was supposed to have been kept very quiet -- and let's reiterate, the docs in the Corvette garage are a byproduct, a footnote, a bagatelle that are connected only in some remote way to something bigger that's still under wraps.

The new Deep Throat seems to have put this additional information about:

The Justice Department (DOJ) reportedly sent a secret letter to President Joe Biden’s personal attorneys to search his multiple residences for classified documents after the trove at the Penn Biden Center was unearthed on November 2.

. . . The New York Times reported Friday that “[t]he quiet cooperation continued for weeks” between the aides and the DOJ. This not only tried to obscure the scandal from public view but reportedly refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents was already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents stored at the Biden Penn Center.

It was then, during the plot to keep the scandal concealed from the public, the DOJ sent a letter to Biden’s personal attorneys and asked them to confirm that no other classified documents existed apart from the trove already unearthed, the Times reported.

It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

It looks to me like the source of the leak is from the Justice Department, not the White House, and at a high enough level that they have knowledge of a "secret letter". The New York Times article, behind a paywall but excerpted here, goes into detail on the White House strategy to keep quiet on the docs until the whole thing would go away:

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 J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate…

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; Mr. 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.

One thing I'm starting to notice is how much Biden relies not just on Hunter, but assorted siblings, Frank, Jim, and Valerie, to manage his affairs. And this family seems dysfunctional even by presidential standards: Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Tony Rodham, and Neil Bush all fade in comparison with the whole Biden clan. These people are going to turn into a major liability. And somebody, maybe multiple people, is now taking notes and talking to the New York Times.

Also yesterday, we got a small hint of what the real search at the Penn Biden Center was about:

Joe Biden’s name was mentioned prominently in an October 2017 email seeking to firm up a controversial, multimillion-dollar deal to ship natural gas from the US to China, the communication, found on first son Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, reveals.

In a missive dated Oct. 27 of that year, Louisiana attorney Robert W. Fenet told Hunter and his uncle, first brother Jim Biden, that he had secured a contact for them at Houston energy company Cherniere, the Daily Mail reported Friday.

“I confirm I have requested [the contact] to be available for a call from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden on Monday morning,” Fenet wrote.

My current surmise is that the Biden legal team has been reviewing Hunter's laptop in great detail and scrubbing any corroborating evidence in other records, including those at the Penn Biden Center and Biden residences. That random new e-mails keep surfacing from the laptop, more than two years after its October 2020 discovery, suggests there's a great deal more to find.