{"id":1818333,"date":"2023-01-21T09:04:55","date_gmt":"2023-01-21T14:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1818333"},"modified":"2023-01-21T09:09:50","modified_gmt":"2023-01-21T14:09:50","slug":"anita-dunn-was-behind-decision-to-keep-classified-docs-story-from-the-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/anita-dunn-was-behind-decision-to-keep-classified-docs-story-from-the-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Anita Dunn Was Behind Decision to Keep Classified Docs Story From the Press"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fanita-dunn-was-behind-decision-to-keep-classified-docs-story-from-the-press%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1818333&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47-->\n<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/52172b4c-cf2b-45d1-86b4-d1384ae043ea@news.ap_.org-1110x740-1.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\"   style=\"display:none\"><\/div>\n<p>Joe Biden is now officially in trouble. While many in the media are eager to point out that Biden\u2019s classified document scandal isn\u2019t as bad in some ways as Trump\u2019s classified document scandal, some realists have admitted that they\u2019re similar enough that there\u2019s probably not a lot to be gained here. And one reason that\u2019s true is that while Biden\u2019s people did quickly call the National Archives to, in effect, turn themselves in once the documents were found, they sat on the findings as far as the public was concerned.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019ve watched any of the White House press briefings this week then you already know this has been something the White House press corps has repeatedly brought up. Why did you not inform the public about the election until after it was over? Why wasn\u2019t the White House as forthcoming with Americans as it was with the bureaucrats?<\/p>\n<p>Both the <em>Washington Post<\/em> And the <em>NY Times<\/em> Deep dives have been published to try and explain why the White House behaved this way. Some Democrats even agreed with the decision to cover the story. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2023\/01\/18\/biden-strategy-classified-documents-backfired\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">was a mistake<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Doug Jones (D.Ala.), a former senator, said that the Biden Team was correct to quickly notify authorities of its discoveries. He also stated that it was crucial to respond appropriately from an legal perspective. He said that the White House could have been transparenter with the public.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI would have probably opted to do some things a little bit differently,\u201d Jones was a former prosecutor. \u201cWhen it came the appropriate time to make a statement, give as much facts as you can without jeopardizing the investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>So why did they just sit on it? This is the Post&#8217;s answer. They believed it would be done quickly, which seemed to make the situation better. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2023\/01\/18\/biden-strategy-classified-documents-backfired\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PR strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Early on, Biden\u2019s attorneys and Justice Department investigators both thought they had a shared understanding about keeping the matter quiet. They had different reasons.<\/p>\n<p>The White House hoped for a quick inquiry to determine if there was any intentional mishandling of documents. Justice would then give its all-clear.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Even though the story was finally revealed several weeks later by the media, the White House insisted that the facts be kept secret.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>CBS News was the first news outlet to discover the situation. They contacted the White House Jan. 6 in order to inquire about the Penn Biden Center documents. White House officials confirmed the scoop, but since the investigation was ongoing, they decided not to offer any additional details \u2014 including the critical information that a second batch of documents had been discovered at Biden\u2019s home.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Today, the NY Times published their take on the secret decisions made about this possible scandal. The Times names another top Biden adviser, Crisis PR Specialist, as one of the few who knew the truth from the beginning. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/01\/20\/us\/politics\/biden-classified-documents.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Anita Dunn<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 \u2014 six days before the midterm elections \u2014 gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump\u2019s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president\u2019s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president\u2019s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Mr. Biden\u2019s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>If you\u2019re not familiar with Dunn, she was the person behind the war on Fox News during the Obama administration. She\u2019s been in and out of the White House since the start of the Biden administration. She was instrumental in the creation of the phrase \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/hotair.com\/john-s-2\/2022\/05\/13\/anita-dunn-and-the-white-house-spent-six-months-coming-up-with-ultra-maga-n469272\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ultra MAGA<\/a>\u201d and I strongly suspect she\u2019s the person behind Biden\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/hotair.com\/john-s-2\/2021\/03\/26\/washington-post-bidens-border-censorship-suspicious-explanation-yesterday-lame-n381306\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">border strategy PR<\/a>, i.e. refusing to admit there\u2019s a crisis and always referring to the situation as a \u201cchallenge.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Times story suggests that the desire to keep the investigation in the documents quiet came from Biden\u2019s lawyers who were afraid publicizing the situation would make it more likely a special counsel would be appointed. Normally the advice of the lawyers would be at odds with the advice of the communications staff who genuinely think it\u2019s better to get out ahead of scandals, but not <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/01\/20\/us\/politics\/biden-classified-documents.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in this case<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Once the discovery of the original batch of documents was revealed, Ms. Dunn was adamant that the White House should keep the public information flow to a trickle and focus instead on how different Mr. Biden\u2019s case was from the broader investigation into his predecessor, according to people familiar with the discussions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Dunn also stressed the need to underscore the differences between Mr. Biden\u2019s cooperation with the archives and Justice Department and Mr. Trump\u2019s defiance\u2026<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In announcing Mr. Hur\u2019s selection, Mr. Garland, who seldom discusses prosecutorial moves not previously disclosed in court filings, offered his own detailed timeline of the department\u2019s involvement in the case, revealing for the first time that the second batch of classified material had been discovered by Mr. Biden\u2019s team on Dec. 20, weeks after the first.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The Justice Department was able to appear more transparent than the White House about the matter. For the president\u2019s team, that brought immediate blowback as reporters pressed for more answers and Republicans accused the White House of a cover-up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Because they were transparenter than the White House, the DOJ seemed more transparent than it was. Because there was a covering-up, it appears that there was one. If the story hadn\u2019t leaked, the White House would have gone on saying nothing because that\u2019s how Anita Dunn likes it.<\/p>\n<p>Again, I can\u2019t prove she\u2019s the person behind Biden\u2019s approach to the border but I think there are some obvious similarities. Her approach is to establish the terms of debate by withholding information as long as possible, and then spin any leaks where they are necessary.<\/p>\n<p>I have to wonder if people in the White House aren\u2019t getting little tired of Dunn\u2019s advice. Granted she helped them bury the border story for many months but ultimately that didn\u2019t fix the problem or avert the crisis. The same applies to classified documents. Although she kept it off the news for several months, it eventually came out. And when it did, the White House looks very shifty in its efforts to keep it quiet for so long.<\/p>\n<p>One person is not likely to be thrilled by it, I can tell ya.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">REPORTER: &#8220;Did you know?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>KJP: &#8220;No I did not know!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>REPORTER: &#8220;When did you learn about the documents found at the Penn Center\u2026?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>KJP: &#8220;When your team was doing a story on it.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/v2T7mAUR51\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pic.twitter.com\/v2T7mAUR51<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Townhall.com (@townhallcom) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/townhallcom\/status\/1615431099764580357?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">January 17, 2023<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Biden is now officially in trouble. While many in the media are eager to point out that Biden\u2019s classified document scandal isn\u2019t as bad in some ways as Trump\u2019s classified document scandal, some realists have admitted that they\u2019re similar enough that there\u2019s probably not a lot to be gained here. And one reason that\u2019s &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1818336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[12842,5458,7372,4552,7077,15893,4604,3819,4178],"class_list":["post-1818333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report","tag-anita","tag-bongino","tag-classified","tag-decision","tag-docs","tag-dunn","tag-press","tag-report","tag-story"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1818333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1818336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1818333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1818333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1818333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}