In 2017 in his final days as Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden had a whirlwind of activity, including swearing in a new Congress, a surprise Medal of Freedom, a speech at Davos and one final trip to Ukraine.
Biden’s aides scrambled to pack up his workspaces in the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and at his official residence, the Naval Observatory — and made for a muddled and hurried process of packing boxes of documents and papers late into the night, even as more material kept arriving.
Among the aides working in Biden’s office at the time were his chief of staff Steve Ricchetti, senior adviser Mike Donilon and communications director Kate Bedingfield, who now all hold senior roles in Biden’s White House. But according to people familiar with the matter, it was lower-level staffers who carried out most of the actual packing of Biden’s belongings and documents, including his executive assistant Kathy Chung, who now works at the Pentagon, as well as other personal aides.
Now there is a special counsel investigation into how classified materials were handled.
- Among the 10 classified documents include US intelligence memorandums and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.
- It was a manilla folder marked “VP personal” that contained one of the classified documents that was first discovered last November by the Biden attorney.
- There was also a memo from Biden to President Barack Obama, as well as two briefing memos preparing Biden for phone calls – one with the British prime minister, the other with Donald Tusk, the former prime minister of Poland who served as president of the European Council from 2014-2019. It’s unclear how much of this material remains sensitive.
“It was just a really really weird time for everyone,” the source familiar said.
The closing days of the Obama-Biden administration were marked by uneasiness with the Trump inauguation looming, and work continued up until the last minute to pack mementos, photographs, and personal papers.
While most official documents were being turned over for weeks prior to the inauguation, Biden kept a steady pace of meetings and official events.
Each high-profile meeting required a briefing memo – often containing classified information important for the President to know before sitting down with foreign leaders.
In just the final five days of his vice presidency, Biden met in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and in Switzerland with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He spoke by phone with the prime minister of Iraq two days before leaving office. And earlier in the week he held calls with the president of Kosovo and the prime minister of Japan. As his team worked in Washington to ensure all the classified material in his offices were properly packed and submitted to the government, more classified documents continued to arrive.
While the National Archives sends staff members to the White House to gather files and papers of the President, they do not treat all vice presidential papers with the same high regard, officials said. A vice president’s staff is often left to sort through the papers themselves.
Many boxes of personal items — not under the records requirements to be left behind to the National Archives — were sent to a nearby facility run by the General Services Administration. From there the boxes went to another temporary office before being sent to the Penn-Biden Center in 2018.
More details at CNN.