Who Is Kathy Chung?

Almost completely ignored in Thursday's news was this item, which shows how poorly reporters are actually following the classified documents story:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has issued a detailed request to a former Joe Biden "gatekeeper" for documents and communications from her time working at the Penn-Biden center, specifically anything related to her involvement in the handling and removal of "highly classified" materials.

The story doesn't even mention the gatekeeper's name until halfway down:

"The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden's possession of highly classified documents from his time as Vice President," Comer wrote to Kathy Chung in a Feb. 4 letter. "The documents retrieved from President Biden's personal office and home included documents designated as 'sensitive compartmented information' ... which is used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources. The Committee has obtained evidence showing that you had keycard access to Penn Biden Center. Recent reporting indicates in January 2017 you — while serving as then-Vice President Biden's executive assistant — helped pack up the departing Vice President's office.

I've run into her here and there over the past several weeks. for instance in this story at the UK Daily Mail on January 19:

Kathy Chung, who served as Biden's administrative assistant when he was vice president, has been interviewed by law enforcement about the scandal.

She told associates she is 'distressed' that she may have 'inadvertently been involved in moving or storing classified material' that a Biden lawyer later uncovered at the Penn Biden Center in November, the Washington Post reported.

I haven't been the only person following the case to note that no photos of her appear to be available. However, based on the timeline, I would expect her to be close to retirement age, since she has been a longtime denizen of Bidenworld.

Who is Kathy Chung? Curiously, neither the U.K. Daily Mail nor Fox News, both of which are experts at digging up photos, has been able to come up with a picture of Ms. Chung, despite her currently serving in a rather public position for a rather public figure, the Defense secretary, Lloyd Austin.

. . . Kathy Chung (aka Kathy Sang-Ok Chung, Kathy S. Geraghty) was an assistant to then Vice President Joe Biden--that is, in 2015.

The AKAs simply don't register in web searches. According to the Daily Mail link above,

Chung was an assistant in the Senate Office of the Vice President, after working for a trio of influential senators, including former Delaware Sen. Ted [Kaufman], a longtime Biden advisor who filled his seat when Biden left the Senate.

This brings us to Ted Kaufman. According to Wikipedia,

Kaufman was appointed to the Senate to serve the remainder of longtime Senator Joe Biden's term after he was elected Vice President in 2008. Prior to becoming a U.S. Senator, Kaufman had served as an advisor to Biden for much of his political career and later served as the head of his presidential transition.

In 1972 he joined Joe Biden's U.S. Senate campaign, which was considered to be a long shot, on a volunteer basis. After Biden's surprise victory in 1972, he took a one-year leave of absence from DuPont to organize and head Senator Biden's Delaware Office. In 1976 he became Biden's Chief of Staff and administrative assistant and served until 1995, also working on Biden's subsequent Senate campaigns. After Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, Kaufman was chosen to head Biden's transition team.

In other words, Kaufman was a long-time Biden political retainer dating from his initial Senate campaign, and Kathy Chung appears to have worked for Kaufman and Biden himself, at least on and off, for much of the same period.

According to Fox News, when Biden's previous executive assistant as vice president, Michele Smith, left that job in 2012, Hunter Biden recommended Chung as her replacement.

Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden during the Obama administration, Chung regularly communicated with Biden's son Hunter Biden, transmitting information about his father's schedule and passing messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital.

During this period, she appears to have worked with Hunter on a familiar basis to relay sensitive information to him. The Daily Mail reproduces an e-mail from the laptop, via the Marco Polo site, from June 7, 2015, wherein from her Executive Office of the President e-mail account she e-mails Hunter at his Rosemont Seneca account with the private cell numbers of nearly 30 people, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Joe Manchin, Steny Hoyer, and Loretta Lynch.

One thing I've come to notice about Bidenworld is that it's populated by long-term retainers, to the point that some, like Ted Kaufman, have simply aged out due to the length of Biden's career. Kathy Chung appears to have moved in and out of the Biden orbit, though likely never too far away. and she's returned to the inner circle when needed.

It seems to me that what such people have in common, and what makes them valuable to the Bidens, is that they're reflexively familiar with how the family operates, and they've been with them so long they can't be shocked by anything they see.

The picture that's beginning to emerge for me is that Biden has been the same guy, and the people around him have operated the same way, for at least 50 years. For that whole period, it's been important that the people around the family be impervious to what might otherwise shock ordinary people. As I said the other day, if you think there's hanky-pank going on, there probably is, and it's worse than you imagined.