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Washington
CNN
—
The first days of 2017 have been a whirlwind for Vice President Joe Biden: swearing in a new Congress, a surprise Medal of Freedom, a speech in Davos and one last trip to Ukraine.
Partly to wrap up his political portfolios, partly to tout his accomplishments and partly to deal with the death of his son a year earlier, Biden went to work in a final sprint to mark what then appeared to be the end of four – a decade at the highest levels of management.
Because Biden was busy, his office was closed. Aides scrambled to pack his offices in the West Wing, Eisenhower’s executive office building, and in his official residence, the Naval Observatory.
Those competing goals—to use his office until the last minute, even though he was forced to close—led to a messy and hectic process that kept aides packing boxes of papers and documents late into the night, even as new materials continued to arrive.
Exactly how a small batch of classified documents ended up in boxes of Biden’s personal belongings remains an open question. The White House and lawyers for the current president declined to say who exactly packed and moved the material. Those questions are now central to the special counsel’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material since leaving the White House in 2017.
This account of how Biden’s aides liquidated his vice presidency, and new details about the classified documents they placed with personal effects, is based on interviews with former and current administration officials and others familiar with the process.
At a minimum, placing classified documents under “personal and political documents” reveals that the record-keeping process has gone awry. According to a person familiar with the find, it was a folder labeled “VP personal” that contained one of the classified documents first discovered last November by Biden’s lawyer, setting off the chain of events.
Among the items from Biden’s time as vice president are 10 classified documents, including US intelligence memos and briefing materials, that cover topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to the person.
There was also a note from Biden to President Barack Obama, as well as two briefing notes 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 Union council from 2014- 2019 It is not clear how much of this material remains sensitive.
Former aides and others familiar with the process of moving Biden out of public service described a serious enforcement effort hampered by an unusually active last stretch.
“It made the process very disjointed — not because people weren’t capable, but because it wasn’t some straight line from the White House,” said a source with direct knowledge of the process. “Everyday life has almost sped up these past few days. All the while, people were trying to make sure he still had what he needed, while trying to pack in the moments when he wasn’t there.”
The packing was done by members of Biden’s staff, including lower-level aides and assistants, who were given boxes to store the vice president’s belongings.
Among the aides working in Biden’s office at the time were his chief of staff Steve Ricchetti and communications director Kate Bedingfield, who now hold senior positions in the Biden White House. Other top aides who have worked with Biden for decades, including senior adviser Mike Donilon, have previously left the administration.
Lower-level officials did most of the actual packing of Biden’s belongings and documents, including his executive assistant Cathy Chung, who now works at the Pentagon, and other personal aides, according to people familiar with the matter.
Chung was interviewed in the investigation into classified documents found in Biden’s personal offices, according to a defense official. She did not respond to CNN’s attempts to contact her.
These final days of Biden’s vice presidency have been a flurry of packing up memorabilia, photos and personal documents, people familiar with the matter said. Although most of Biden’s files and documents were turned over to the National Archives in a process that began weeks before he left office, last-minute work continued into the hours he left the White House for Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Trump’s impending arrival in the White House has left many Obama and Biden aides cautious about the future and eager to consolidate many of their accomplishments. It was an unsettling moment, according to many who lived through it.
“It’s been a really, really weird time for everyone,” said a source familiar with the matter.
The steady pace of official events maintained by Biden in recent days has made the process of packing up his office more difficult, according to former aides. Every high-level meeting required a briefing note—often containing classified information that was important for the president to know before sitting down with foreign leaders.
In just the last 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 on the phone with the prime minister of Iraq two days before leaving office. And earlier in the week, he held talks with the President of Kosovo and the Prime Minister of Japan. While his team worked in Washington to ensure that all classified material in his offices was properly packaged and turned over to the government, more classified documents continued to arrive.
“Documents and briefings are always coming in and it didn’t slow down even as the boxes were being packed,” said another person familiar with the process.
Aides worked through the night to complete the packing, according to a person familiar with the matter, to avoid interfering with Biden continuing to use his offices.
“We had clear guidance on the Presidential Records Act — everybody did — in terms of how to close things,” said one of the people familiar with the matter. “The people who really should have been paying attention to them certainly did.” To most of us it wasn’t an all-consuming thing, but obviously to those in charge of the vice president’s affairs, it was a big deal and they treated it as such.
The process of packing up Biden’s office was separate from ongoing efforts to pack up and preserve Obama’s documents, some of which were sent to a temporary facility in Illinois. Biden’s office dealt directly and separately with the National Archives to ensure the vice president’s records were turned over, according to a former administration official.
While the National Archives sends staff to the White House to collect presidential files and documents, it does not treat all vice presidential documents with the same high regard, officials said.
Staff in the vice president’s office are often left to sort through the documents on their own, officials say, rather than archivists. Although classified documents maintain the same level of secrecy for presidents, vice presidents and anyone with the appropriate security clearance to handle them, officials say it will be easier for documents outside the Oval Office to be misplaced or left behind.
Many of the boxes of personal items — not considered covered by the National Archives’ document surrender requirements — were transported from the vice president’s office to a temporary facility about a block from the White House operated by the General Services Administration. From there, they went to another temporary office before eventually being moved to the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank that Biden launched in early 2018.
“GSA support is available for six months after the end of their term; while former presidents then continue to receive lifetime support from GSA, former vice presidents do not,” a GSA spokesperson told CNN. “In 2017, GSA provided approximately 5,300 usable square feet of office space to the outgoing vice president’s transition team at 1717 Pennsylvania Ave, NW. The outgoing vice president’s transition team vacated the premises on July 21, 2017.”
But in these tense final days of his tenure, with boxing and cataloging going on in the White House, Biden was on the move. Obama began the final week of his administration with a surprise for his running mate: presenting Biden with the prestigious Medal of Freedom in a state dining ceremony that left the vice president in tears.
It is intended to be a farewell to public life, which the medal’s citation clearly states: “A grateful nation thanks Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. for his life of service on behalf of the United States of America.”
At the time, the idea of Biden running for president in 2020 wasn’t even a personal consideration as he prepared to enter the private sector for the first time in his adult life.
The morning after receiving the Medal of Freedom, Biden traveled to New York to appear on ABC’s “The View,” joining Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar at the talk show table as another stop on his public service victory tour.
Biden then traveled to Kyiv, met with Poroshenko and wished him well, saying, “I want to say what a privilege it has been to support and support Ukraine for the past 25 years, first as a senator and more recently as vice president. ”
And at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he delivered a farewell address and met on the sidelines with Xi, whom he knew when they were both vice presidents.
According to former aides, Biden was focused on commemorating his work in Ukraine, as well as other policy areas assigned to him by Obama.
Three days later, Biden attended Trump’s inauguration. At noon on January 20, 2017, he was without the trappings of office or title in Washington for the first time in 44 years. He boarded his beloved Amtrak back to his home in Wilmington.
Behind the scenes, a small contingent of Biden aides were unpacking boxes and building a new house on Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., a rental property where Alexander Haig, Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff and Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, once lived. It served as an office and gathering place as Biden’s longtime advisers helped him chart his new path, with his decision to challenge Trump and return to the White House not even a personal consideration at the time.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Mike Donilon was not working at the White House in January 2017.
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