Hypocrisy 101: Joe Biden scuppered Jimmy Carter's CIA nominee over mishandling of classified documents
Joe Biden assured us that he takes the handling of U.S. secrets "very seriously,' and sure enough another trove of illegally stored classified documents rolled out from one of the Biden residences.
That's flamin' hot hypocrisy in itself, but it gets worse when we learn of Joe's pious history around such documents.
Fox News discovered that Biden during his senator days, was quick to scupper Jimmy Carter's 1977 nomination of Ted Sorenson as director of the CIA, on the grounds that Sorenson mishandled classified documents he had access to for the purpose of writing a biography of his former mentor, President John F. Kennedy.
Biden, of course, didn't really care about the classified documents, even then.
According to the Washington Post's Robert G. Kaiser, reporting the news at the time (emphasis mine):
The forced withdrawal of Theodore C. Sorensen's nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence - the first defeat of Jimmy Carter's still-unborn presidency - was a painfully public display of Carter's limited influence on Capitol Hill.
...
Carter's unusually ardent courtship of Congress during the transition period suggests a realization that his position needs strengthening. His decision not to fight harder for Sorensen may be a sign of strategic political tractability.
And Sorensen obviously did pose a special set of problems. He had few enthusiastic supporters and many critics from all sides of the political arena.
Moreover, Sorensen's candid affidavits on behalf of Daniel Ellsberg and The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case inflamed the powerful intelligence lobby on Capitol Hill - the same forces what routed Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and other would-be reformers who sought to strengthen congressional control over the intelligence community last spring.
So Biden was spouting his pieties about classified documents because he was all-in with the deep state even then.
Sorenson was a critic of the deep state and its operations back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Pentagon papers case was going on. Joe somehow took it on himself to join with the deep-state crowd even if it undercut Carter, the sitting Democrat president. Carter eventually ended up with an incompetent, Adm. Stansfield Turner, to lead that agency to many intelligence disasters in the 1970s.
But Biden was loud and noisy about not confirming Sorenson, which was weird stuff, given that Sorenson was largely an inoffensive creature and his mishandling of the classified documents was known within the context of its purpose, which was book-writing. (We don't know what the known purpose of Joe's mishandling of classified documents was.)
During Sorenson’s confirmation hearing, Biden said the "real issue" was "whether Mr. Sorensen intentionally took advantage of ambiguities in the law, or carelessly ignored the law."
"If he did so, can he now bring the activities of the intelligence community within the strict limits of the law?" Biden asked. "We will expect that in the future of intelligence agencies. If that is to be the case, then we must hold the Director — DCI — accountable as well."
Hypocrite much, Joe?
How he can explain himself now as his own mishandling of classified documents comes to light is beyond comprehension. It's bad for Ted Sorenson to have classified documents in his possession to write a book, but it's O.K. for Joe to have them, even though nobody knows his purpose?
It does tells us that he's always been a company man for the deep state, and that the deep state has looked the other way when he mishandled documents -- and that this has been going on for decades.
How many more revelations will we get? Obviously, Joe has been up to no good for years and eventually, the truth is going to come out.
Image: Twitter screen shot