Commentary: Biden Staffer Who Mishandled China, Iran Secrets Retains High-Security

by Paul Sperry

While Special Counsel Robert K. Hur has raised the issue of mental deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for illegal retention and sharing of classified documents, the president chose another rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his records as he left the vice president’s office in 2017.

At a press conference hastily assembled after the report’s release, Biden said he assumed his aides had shipped “all” the documents to the National Archives in College Park, Md. “I wish I had paid more attention to how the documents were being moved and where,” he said. “I thought they were being moved to the Archives. I thought all of it was being moved [there].”

The president’s explanation does not address how and why he shared classified material with a ghostwriter, but it shines a light on the longtime assistant who was in charge of packing his papers, Kathy S. Chung.

Chung, an old friend of Hunter Biden, began working for Joe Biden in 2012 when he was vice president. She told investigators she oversaw the transfer of the contents of Biden’s file cabinets and desk drawers into 15 boxes when he moved out of the West Wing in January 2017. While other office material did go to the National Archives, Hur rebuked Biden for keeping more than 600 pages of classified information – including military secrets and intelligence sources and methods – in unlocked and unauthorized containers at multiple locations, including a tattered box in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home. The stash included information marked “top secret” involving Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Some of the secrets are compartmented by codewords and can only be stored and read in a secure facility known as a SCIF.

The Biden documents that Chung herself packed, unpacked, and repacked “are the most highly classified, sensitive and compartmented materials recovered during our investigation,” Hur wrote.

Yet the prosecutor let Chung as well as Biden off the hook in also declining to press charges against her, explaining that he found plausible her account that she packed and kept the classified papers “by mistake, ”even though she had prior government experience handling and identifying classified information and was told in a Jan. 3, 2017, National Security Council memo to be sure to remove “only unclassified personal records,” and despite providing inconsistent answers to investigators.

After the election, Biden appointed Chung to a top Pentagon position serving as assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, where she has access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets.

Hur also went to great lengths to protect her identity in his 388-page report. He refers to her only as “Executive Assistant” and her face is deliberately blurred through pixilation in a photo he published of her sitting in front of a file cabinet in her West Wing office, where she stored Biden’s secret papers.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served as President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency director and President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, is among those who believe Chung deserves far more public scrutiny. “What is very clear is Chung needs to be further investigated,” Flynn told RealClearInvestigations. “She should have her clearance immediately suspended and probably revoked completely.”

This is not the first time Chung has been found to have mishandled sensitive government documents. In the late 1990s, when she worked with Hunter Biden at the Commerce Department as an administrator, she and her boss Melissa Moss were cited by a federal judge for failing to turn over documents sought in a Freedom of Information Act case, as RealClearInvestigations first reported. They were accused of withholding and even destroying key documents in a search that the judge ruled “grossly inadequate” and “unlawful.”

A lawyer for Chung did not respond to requests for comment.

Chung was interviewed twice by FBI agents: once on Jan. 4, 2023, and again on Sept. 28, 2023. Details of Chung’s key role in one of Washington’s worst violations of laws safeguarding national security secrets are reported here for the first time. Hur’s own report, however, undermines his conclusion that Chung was likely unaware of the voluminous classified material she repeatedly handled.

The record shows that Chung personally dispersed the sensitive material to at least three locations in the years when Biden was out of office, 2017-2021 – including two temporary office sites before they were “discovered” in 2022 at the Penn Biden Center in D.C. in an unlocked office frequented by visitors. She routinely retrieved files Biden requested – some stamped with the label “EYES ONLY” which she knew to mean the contents inside were classified. And many of the classified folders include markings in her handwriting. She also helped identify material in 2022, when the president’s retention of classified documents became an issue after his Department of Justice raided Donald Trump’s Florida home in search of secret material.

The path that the highly sensitive national security documents took from the White House is a circuitous one fraught with potential breaches of security.

‘Eyes Only’

In the last days of Biden’s vice presidency, Chung packed up his files from his West Wing suite, the bulk of which were stored in the front office she manned. She said she packed the materials in boxes provided by the General Services Administration in an operation that took “a couple of days” in January 2017. Chung told investigators she “did not believe the files contained classified documents.” She claimed she did not pay close attention to what she was packing, because she was in a hurry. However, she also said she knew at the time that Biden “was going to write a book,” which she helped him research.

Chung first shipped the 15 boxes to a nearby “transition office” leased by the GSA, where some of the boxes were unpacked and where she met with Biden over the next six months. At the same time, Biden rented a home in McLean, Va., where Hur said some of the classified materials appear to have ended up in Biden’s basement office.

It’s unclear if Chung had a role in moving any of the boxes to the McLean rental, but after the GSA lease expired in May 2017, she reloaded the boxes in her car and moved them to a private office that she leased in D.C., according to a partial transcript of her closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee. “It was near Chinatown,” she told lawmakers during her April 4, 2023, deposition.

The boxes containing highly classified papers remained at the site for several months. Curiously, Hur mentions this location only in passing, even though it was an important link in the chain of custody. It does not appear that he investigated the security system there. Nor does it appear that Chung was asked what she or Biden did with the files while they were stored there. In a footnote, Hur noted that Biden met with the former prime minister of Ukraine at that temporary office space in May 2017.

Then in October 2017, Chung relocated the 15 boxes a few blocks away to the newly built Penn Biden Center on the sixth floor of another D.C. office building, where she unpacked Biden’s White House documents – including some marked “top secret” – and placed them into a three-drawer filing cabinet in her outer office adjoining Biden’s office, which was designed to resemble his old West Wing suite. Other documents were left in boxes stacked in an unlocked storage closet, refuting initial White House claims they were stored in a “locked closet.” Remarkably, the entire office suite was never locked up, which meant virtually anybody who got past the security guard in the lobby of the building had access to the classified files stored there.

“Mr. Biden’s office did not lock,” Hur noted in his report, “and the adjoining outer office where Mr. Biden’s executive assistant maintained his files was always accessible through Mr. Biden’s office.” In a footnote, Hur added that “the Vice President’s office could only be locked from the inside using a panic button.”

Office security got even more “relaxed” in early 2019, Hur revealed, when visitors to the Penn Biden Center no longer needed a key fob or an escort to access the sixth floor of the building. Biden’s office, filled with secret government documents including high-level memos on China, was left virtually open to the public – including University of Pennsylvania students who took classes at the center and were allowed to work in the office space during the day.

The center is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, which has received several million dollars from anonymous Chinese donors since opening the…