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.
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.
The new location adds yet another layer to the confusing classified documents debacle in which the files ended up inside a locked cabinet at the Penn Biden Center where they got discovered in November 2022 – while raising new questions about the total universe of people who might have had access to the documents over a last six years.
People involved in the process include Biden’s former staff members, General Services Administration personnel, and the staff at the think tank, an entity that would later have roles for senior aides that remain in Biden’s orbit, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who served as the center’s managing director.
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.
‘Hunter Biden recommended it. They had worked together at Department of Commerce years ago,’ the person said. Hunter notified her of the opportunity, asked her if she was interested, and found out that she was.
‘He spoke to her father about her,’ said the person. So did former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden associate who is among the trio of Democratic senators she had worked for in the past.
Hunter Biden did a stint at the agency under Secretary William Daley at the tail end of the Clinton Administration from 1998 to 2001, following a job at a bank at the start of a career in law and lobbying.
Then, as now, he had his father’s ear on a variety of matters.
Chung was the first person to be publicly identified as meeting with federal investigators in the matter. She spoke to US Attorney John Lausch’s office before AG Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to oversee the documents probe.
Officials working with Biden at the time who remain attached to him are senior aides Steve Richetti and Kate Bedingfield, and senior advisor Mike Donilon.
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.
