Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman was questioned by CBS "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan last week about why President Biden would send his personal attorney, who l

Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman was questioned by CBS "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan last week about why President Biden would send his personal attorney, who lacked the necessary security clearance, to his Delaware home to look over secret documents. Brennan presumably thought that to find classified materials, a person needed to be authorized to read them. Brennan raised an intriguing question by concentrating on who was reading Biden's documents. The question hanging in the air, however, relates to the discovery that started this whole process: Why would lawyers be "packing up" Biden's office in the Penn Biden Center in the first place?

Joe Biden has done a great job of converting political achievement into financial gain, not unlike other politicians. But someone who for years identified as "middle-class Joe" should understand the wastefulness of having lawyers handle work that a dependable intern or assistant could handle. If the intention wasn't really to "pack," but rather to purge, it's an outrageously costly packing crew considering that many prominent East Coast attorneys now frequently charge $1,000 per hour.

This timing is also strange. Evidently, this moving team was present at Biden's University of Pennsylvania office a week before the midterm elections, which were widely believed to give the Republicans control of the House. It would be a good time to get rid of anything incriminating as Republicans had hinted that they would be spending a lot of time using the subpoena powers of multiple House committees to probe Biden and his family. Biden would be able to attach attorney-client privilege to their work and prevent damning testimony regarding the contents of any shredded records by enlisting lawyers to carry out the document cleanse.

To be clear, if a valid document retention request has not been made, it is not against the law to discard stale records. The Biden administration made it plain that until the new Congress was sworn in and the various committee chair gavels were distributed, it would not consider any such request to be legitimate. Congress has not granted such authority to specific members of Congress who are not committee chairmen, and the House has not done so under its present Rules, an administration lawyer stated in response to requests for documents made in December by Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer. You'll essentially have to start anew. Biden effectively set a firm timeline for when document purges transition from permissible to unlawful.

Unfortunately for the president, the lawyers charged with closing down his University of Pennsylvania office stumbled across top-secret government documents and realized the repercussions. We most likely would not be aware of these expensive packers if they had not made those discoveries.

Republicans, including Donald Trump, have criticized the timing of the original discovery and the delay in making the information public. They think Republicans' chances of winning the midterm elections would have been improved if it had been made apparent that Trump wasn't the only person who might have broken the law. Maybe. The timing and procedure do raise concerns, though, about what else the president might be trying to hide.

For now, President Biden wants us to take him at his word that this whole classified documents mess is nothing more than an honest mistake. As he says, "There's no there, there." That may be true, but the activities that preceded the classified document discoveries raise different questions. From a man who campaigned on elevating the standards at the White House, this is disappointing, to say the least.

Biden Document Discovery Doesn't Add Up

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