Judging Freedom - More Biden Classified"Items" Found. Seriously

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, January 23rd, 2023. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. It happened again over the weekend. Joe Biden, the President of the United States. It happened again over the weekend. Joe Biden, the president of the United States, authorized the FBI to go through his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and they found six more items, Mark classified. It's an unusual word, items. Usually these are documents, but they're saying they're items. It's also unusual, I guess, to remove the sting of FBI involvement. All the press is saying this was done by the Justice Department. Well, yes, but the Justice Department's people that do this are FBI.

That's what they do for a living. Federal Bureau of Investigation. They're the investigators for the Department of Justice. This is starting to wear thin on Democrats who are beginning to wonder, does old Joe know what he's doing? Some of these documents apparently go back to his years in the Senate, which raised the interesting question, did the statute of limitations expire? The statute of limitations on these crimes is five years. If they're going to charge him with the unlawful removal of the documents from some secured facility to his home, and that happened more than five years ago, then they can't charge him. The

statute of limitations has expired. If they're going to charge him with the unlawful retention of the documents, two different crimes. Well, he retained them until the FBI found them yesterday. So obviously the statute of limitations has only run for a day and it's got five years to go. It doesn't appear that they can charge him. I know that this conversation sounds weird. We're talking about charging the president with a crime. I guess we all got accustomed to that in the Trump years. But in any case, there does not appear to be an employee of Mar-a-Lago. This witness was told to hide these things from investigators. Joe Biden, either wisely or foolishly, I think wisely, said to the FBI, come and investigate. Let's see what you can find. So I was asked this morning on News Nation, which is an interesting, network. A lot of my former, uh,

Fox colleagues, uh, are there. Um, and it's a network that I would call center, right? But it's pretty down the middle on news stories. Anyway, they had me on this morning and they asked me, uh, how will the DOJ decide whether or not to prosecute? Okay, there's a couple things to look at. How many documents were there? Well, it appears that there are fewer than 20. Now, a document can be one page or it can be a limitless number of pages. Documents or 20 items were found in Biden's garage in his former office at the Penn Biden Center and twice in his home. But we don't know how many pages that is. We know that Trump's documents were about 365 and it came to many thousands of pages. We know this because this was discussed publicly in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn,

New York, when these matters were argued before the special master. Remember that nonsense. The federal court, appellate court eventually got rid of that. But before the federal appeals court decided there's no need for a special master here, the DOJ knows how to examine these documents. The public learned the number of documents that Trump took, and Trump took them. Trump admits that he took them. Biden says he doesn't know how they got there. We also know from FBI leaks, wrong, but they are the best leakers in the world, that Trump had 60 documents that were NDI. NDI is National Defense Information. This is the highest category of secrets the government has. This is defense information about weaponry for either the United

States, an adversary or an ally, in this case, Ukraine and Iran, an ally, maybe you call it a vassal state, Ukraine, and an adversary only because they're adverse to Israel, which is our ally. In either case, the type of information that is in the documents Trump had is the type of thing that the government does prosecute you for when you have it outside of a secure federal facility. We don't know what Joe Biden had. Some items marked classified are a joke. They are merely marked confidential, which is the lowest level of classification, because the writer didn't want the public to see it, but there's no secrets in there at all. Secret means, if revealed, it could harm national security. Top secret means if revealed, it would bring about grave harm to

national security. Then there's four versions of top secret without my going through all of them. The most serious one is this NDI, which they found at Mar-a-Lago. We don't know what level of all these levels, starting with confidential and going to top secret NDI. We don't know what level of all these levels, starting with confidential and going to top secret NDI, we don't know what they found at Biden's home and garage and office. And I would need to know that, you would need to know that before we could all prudently evaluate whether or not he can be charged with a crime. We know the DOJ is not going to charge a sitting president with a crime. We know that if he runs for re-election and wins and serves his full term, then the statute of limitations would have expired because the end of his second term

will be more than five months, or excuse me, five years from now. So there's a lot of ifs, ifs, ifs here. However, the political damage is being done and Democrats are beginning to murmur below the radar and in the hallways, do we really want to have to deal with this in 2024? Do we really want Joe to run again when he doesn't know what kind of top secret documents he's got right under his nose? An interesting question. We'll see where it goes. A lot more is going to come out on this. I don't know if they're going to find more documents and I don't know if the FBI will leak on this like they leaked on Trump. One of the problems with Trump is that the FBI became adverse to him because of his taunting them and because of his trying to hide the documents from them.

Biden's case where he signed a piece of paper letting the FBI search through everything he had in both of his homes, the FBI is not strictly speaking adverse to him, so they may not leak. We'll see. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.