Obama Official: Biden Guilty of “Inexcusable Neglect”

Today on Sekulow, an Obama official calls Biden guilty of, quote, inexcusable neglect. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now more than ever, this is Sekulow.

We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Hey, welcome to Sekulow. We're taking your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. That's 1-800-684-3110. So the Obama, his former ethics chief from the White House, his name is Walter Schaub, released this statement, which I think is very important in the context of everything going on, that we got three special counsels, one criminally investigating Joe Biden, one criminally investigating Donald Trump, one still investigating the Russia hoax that has not produced much. That's Durham.

That's still active as well. So it's pretty unprecedented time just in the country to have that much law enforcement being done outside of the normal process of the Department of Justice and FBI saying it's so extraordinary that you need someone who has its own team and is somewhat independent. It's not like the days of the independent counsel. These special counsels have to report to the attorney general and can be fired or they can be ended at any moment.

So it's a different kind of setup, but usually you've got to let them finish the job or else it would look pretty bad to just get rid of them. Ultimately, we saw Mueller, that example of when you really ultimately got a report and there were some side figures that were getting in trouble, but many of them have been released, got the pardons and were really mistreated. But here's what he had to say about kind of, he takes a shot at Donald Trump, but then he says this about Biden. First, he says, it's not like Trump's deliberate refusal, which is wrong because Trump was negotiating with National Archives over just a few periods of months. But he says, it's not like that about returning classified records demanded by the archives.

Here's the key, because no one makes him have to respond to this. But Biden's own retention of classified records reflects an inexcusable neglect of the most basic security protocols. Logan, when you talk about the pile on, when you have a former Obama administration official like this willing to go to Fox News with a written statement calling what Biden's actions, inexcusable neglect. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it feels pretty calculated to be honest. It feels like there are people involved in this, whether that is with the Obama front or whoever it is who's going in and saying, okay, we need to make these pretty strong statements.

And like I said, I feel like we're headed towards a very interesting 2024 and one that may not be, it may not end up being the players that we all think it is. And I think this is starting some of that conversation. When you start double downing, when you start saying stuff like inexcusable neglect, I mean, that is a pretty big line in the sand. That is not just saying, oh yeah, there were some issues here. And also, you know, it implicates President Trump in the same situation, similar situation, tries to saying it's inexcusable for Trump, it's inexcusable for Biden. But again, it paints a very interesting picture heading into 2024. Yeah, I take his Trump shot as he's a partisan.

And also it's not correct. Trump was in negotiations. He wasn't deliberately refusing. He was in negotiations. At some point, it was probably his attorneys that did something wrong that triggered the FBI raid. It wasn't Donald Trump himself. It was a negotiation that was ongoing.

And that's not that weird. Remember, again, Trump being the President, Biden, these are vice Presidential, this is when he was vice President. They're hitting Biden hard though. They're hitting Biden hard from that front, from the media front.

You'll learn like Colbert and some of those guys even kind of came out swinging pretty hard last night. When that starts happening, you know that there is, like, it's not a conspiracy theory. There are concerted efforts, especially when it comes to testing the waters. That may be where we're at right now. It's not necessarily saying we're not going to have Biden run in 2024, but it's certainly testing the what if he's not.

Well, he didn't just leave it at inexcusable neglect. So we come back for this break. There's more from the former Obama White House ethics official. Then we're going to get into a very bizarre release that we found from the National Archives in October about how these documents are stored, going back to Bush and other, Bill Clinton, George H.W.

Bush, Ronald Reagan even, not mentioning vice Presidents. But then remember, this was released in October, and then about a month later, a little bit less than a month later is when we know the Biden team discovered this first first batch of documents. So we'll take your calls on this. 1-800-684-3110. Inexcusable neglect is pretty close to criminal conduct.

That kind of wording. 1-800-684-3110. We're taking your calls. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org.

We'll be right back on second. All right, so Obama's former, this is the former, of course, White House ethics official, President Obama. So overseeing, of course, the vice President as well, who was Joe Biden at the time. We said he already called it inexcusable neglect of the most basic security protocols, how Biden retained these classified records. But he went on to say this too. The fact that the White House didn't mention that records were found in more than one location when first asked about them was a breach of trust with the public and a self-inflicted wound.

Logan, this goes to exactly what you were talking about. They're talking about breach of public trust. They're not necessarily, this is an ethics official, he's not going to go and say whether he should be prosecuted or not.

He's the sitting President, so you really can't do that. Or if other people, but what he's saying is that breach of public trust is when you say maybe this person shouldn't be the leader of our party. By saying breach of public trust, you're saying this should not be the President of the United States. And that's essentially what you're saying in that.

And if you are an Obama former official, you can start to sort of read between the lines of where things are headed. And I don't know if they're headed there 100%, but I do think there is at least a testing of the waters to are the American people more interested, especially the Democrats, and I mean this from their own people, more interested in having someone else in 2024 because they're able to now use these situations with the documents to potentially not only disqualify, they'll say not only disqualify their own candidate, but also try to just say, well, this now also disqualifies your candidate. It's not a double standard. It's not hypocritical because that's what they've been saying about Trump before all of this is, oh, this totally down to not only January 6th, but this, this record. So they had a very interesting decision to make. Do they say that this is inexcusable on both sides or do they say it's excusable on both sides to save their own candidate? And as of right now, we take the same position that this has been, the documents have been weaponized to just too much of a point where it really shouldn't be inexcusable on either side. But for, I think what Jonathan Turley points out, a law professor GW, he said, you know, like if Biden was using these documents while he was out of office. So if, if, if they weren't just stored away at like Mar-a-Lago, but if they have to do with Ukraine opened the file, so it was using it to help write his book or get information, remind himself about a business deal in Ukraine, because he was preparing a Presidential run. So did he have people reviewing these documents to prepare for issues that might arise during his Presidential run? That rises to another level because that's not unintentional.

That would be intentional conduct. So there, there's a lot to talk about here. We'll get more into that, but I want to go to the letter from the national archives, the statement.

You don't hear a lot. We learned more about the national archives now than ever before. So it's technically the national archives and records administration. So on, and Andy Cahn was joining us now and Andy, they issue a statement October 11th, and they say the national archives in accordance with the Presidential records act assumed physical and legal custody of the Presidential records from the administrations of Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. When those Presidents left office, national archives securely moved these records to temporary facilities that were released from the general services administration, the GSA, near the locations of the future Presidential libraries that former Presidents built for national archives.

All such temporary facilities met strict standards and have been managed and staffed exclusively by national archives employees. Reports that indicator imply that those Presidents records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives after they left office or the records were housed in substandard conditions are false and misleading. This went directly to the fact that the Obama records, we know it's a warehouse. So now they were saying, well, this is our warehouse, but this was directed at Trump. They were attacking Trump through this statement saying, see, these guys all used, don't believe that it's just Obama rented out some like storage facility. It was a storage facility we rented out that we have control over that he does not.

And then once he has his library, we can then transfer there. But Andy, to this point, this is released October 11th. Three weeks later, we know that the former Obama White House counsel who left a week before the midterms found the first group of these classified documents, the TID, in his office at DC.

Right. Well, I think the national archives has got eggs on its face issuing a statement like this without knowing the entire facts. If you look and parse this statement out, among the Presidential records is the Obama administration. That included Joe Biden, okay? And it says that they were all taken in and put in a facility that the GSA leased to them and they were under strict archival and security standards. And then any reports that indicate that the records were left in substandard conditions are false and misleading. Well, we know that's not the case because President Biden was a representative of the Obama administration.

He was the vice President of the Biden administration. So they hurry up to put out this statement that all the records were housed in facilities that met strict archival and security standards. And if you say to the contrary, the national archive says in this statement, you're making a false and misleading statement.

Well, guess what? It's not false and misleading because these records were found in conditions that were abhorrent, in garages, in side rooms, in the Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. So why rush to make a statement when you don't know the whole facts? Who are you covering? Why are you after Trump?

Is that what it is? But then you find out that Biden was just as guilty, if in fact Trump was guilty of anything, but just as negligent as the other one was? Well, we've got our FOIA. We got this out January 12th. I'm holding it by hands right now.

I don't know if we can put it on the screen. Our FOIA is not, obviously we're not going to get classified documents, but the FOIA, Andy, is about the National Archives communications with Joe Biden or his, you know, his designee. And what happened, where was the breakdown where they could issue a statement on October 11th saying, because these records were Obama's records. They were never Joe Biden's records. They were Obama's records.

And if they could issue a statement saying, well, they were all housed and we all had, why didn't they know that there were, what are we up to now? 10, 16, like 17 or 18. Is it 17 or 18? Yeah, there's like a rough number of, then you got to decide what a document is.

Sometimes it's a page, sometimes it's 200 pages, sometimes 1000 pages. Who knows? But, but again, we've got this, this is why our FOIA is so important because there's been a major breakdown at National Archives. It appears that they are, which here we go, another government agency, a benign one to say the least, played politics.

Well, that's exactly what's happening. The FOIA requests that we sent out, and we did that instantaneously upon finding that we had a basis to do that, is to get to the bottom of it. And we wisely and correctly issued it, who? To the National Archives, something that is, as Jordan said, something an organization or an agency of government that you don't hear much about, but now they're at the center of the controversy or very near the center of the controversy. We want to know what communications you had with the Office of the Vice President with respect to these records and how these records have been found in places where they ought not to be.

And what is the archives? Is it being weaponized just like the FBI is being weaponized? It sure smells like it, Jordan.

It really does. Yeah. I mean, to this point, again, when you go to this statement, this to me is kind of like, Andy, when the Biden attorneys said this was, we have all the documents and then Saturday morning we woke up and there were more documents being found.

I don't even know if this is still done. I mean, he's got other homes and he's got, again, other locations and you got to start digging through. I mean, I would imagine as a former Senator and Vice President, he's got boxes and boxes of stuff. You know, Jordan, another thing that's been really bothering me is we are allowing, the government is allowing, the FBI, the Justice Department is allowing these private attorneys to go through all these, and they don't have security clearance for these documents. They're not looking at, they're just, they're going to look at the folder, but they're not, they're not actually looking at what's inside the folder, but even the folder itself might have information that's not appropriate.

Yeah. And then Andy explained to people because they're all becoming witnesses. Every one of those people who is not a federal agent, like an FBI agent, and who is going through these documents automatically makes himself or herself a witness in the case. And I would say that you have a better get ready for a subpoena from Jim Jordan's committee on the judiciary with respect to what you saw, what you did and where you went. And you can't claim attorney-client privilege here because you went outside that privilege and you became a searcher. And as a searcher, you are a witness. And that means you may have to testify.

And I think, again, that is, they have made missteps. I mean, you can say what you want about President Trump and the fight there. When we were his attorneys, we were so careful not to become witnesses. And you always make that distinction. You have the official people who can go in and do their official jobs, but you don't become a witness.

That is not your job is not to dig through to find classified documents. From the beginning, the moment that attorney found one, they should have said, I'm not doing this anymore. And that maybe would be excusable because they found one and then immediately went. But instead they started to say, oh, here's 10. And then, hey, let's run up to the other house and check.

Oh, and then I think making about the Corvette. But now that we've got another government agency engaged here, I mean, I think, Andy, this is to me where if the National Archives is now politicized, because now when you look at their statement and you rise, they got way out ahead of their skis, but something between this statement may have freaked out the Biden team because they may have read it and said, oh, we have it checked and we're going to look like morons if we don't really get him in trouble. Like now we have the Obama former White House ethics person saying this is inexcusable neglect, which Andy is pretty close to using. It's not a legal term. That's pretty close to a kind of criminal conduct, like inexcusable, you know, again, negligence.

You know, when I heard that term inexcusable neglect, I thought, whoa, you're getting very near the criminal threshold to something that may not just be a mere civil error or a civil wrong, but inexcusable neglect. Uh-oh, you're now getting into an area that sure does smell criminal. All right, folks, we'll continue to take your calls. We'll start taking more of those. 1-800-684-3110. Yeah, give us a call, 1-800-684-3110.

I know a lot of you probably have a lot of thoughts on this. We also have some sound bites to play from representatives about this situation, and we got a lot more to cover. Again, 1-800-684-3110. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back to Secular. We got some great calls coming in, good questions, too, and I like these kind of questions. I can tell these are folks who listen to our broadcast and take these issues seriously. So I want to go right to Warren in Idaho on Line 1. Hey, Warren, welcome to Secular. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my call again.

We appreciate all you do. My question is concerning like the documents at the Penn Center, who do we know that have access to them, chain of custody-wise? I mean, with all the China ties there, we don't know who's had access to those documents. Well, Andy, that's always a huge issue when you're talking about documents that would be found that have a potential to be criminal because of the way they're mishandled.

So it's unique to a classified document that because of how they're handled, there are laws in place that make it criminal not to handle them the correct way. And we know there's no log from the home in Delaware. We don't yet know how many people had access to this office. We know some of the employees that were there, a lot of former that are now current officials, but we know they got $54 million from the Chinese government.

I mean, there were people walking around there that were probably not great all the time, and it was in the middle of COVID, so it was probably empty a lot of the time, which means ripe for abuse. Well, that's exactly right. One of the things when the caller mentions the word chain of custody as a former prosecutor, it rings all kind of bells in my head because chain of custody is what gets something in court, or if it's not properly maintained, keeps it out of court. And you've got to prove the chain of custody of documents. So if you've got documents sitting in the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and they're being just sort of stored somewhere, you don't know who's had access to them or who hasn't had access to them. Who's touched those? Who has removed things from those? Where have those documents been?

I mean, I'm raising questions that a prosecutor would raise. Who has them? Where did they go?

How long have they been here? Have they been tampered with? Have they been taken apart? Have they been re-commingled with other documents?

Have they been unstable? Has other stuff been put in there? It raises all these questions that really are serious questions as to the integrity of the document, ultimately, Jordan. A lot of people are bringing that up, and you have a conversation that happened with Jonathan Turley, who was probably on Fox or on one of them.

And I think we should play this because it kind of ties all of that in. The problem is that the Mar-a-Lago documents were held in a storage room that the FBI stipulated additional security for. It was an area protected by the Secret Service, had camera surveillance, even though it is not a secure location for classified documents. And I don't believe classified documents should ever have been taken there. That comparison actually works against President Biden. There is no comparison between that storage room and keeping documents next to your Corvette in the garage.

I have no idea why they would want to raise that comparison. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. You can say all you want about Trump, like Turley said, but there were Secret Service there. There were video cameras there.

There's a log there of everybody who goes into Mar-a-Lago, the members included, but guests as well, just like any other country club, which would know about guests. It's an interesting angle because I thought about it that way. No, he didn't think the classified documents should be there. They were having the negotiations about removing them and turning them back to National Archives and which ones were still classified and which ones were no longer classified and how do you figure that out? That's an actual dispute. But what he's saying, Andy, is that to compare that to Biden makes Biden look that much worse. And it was Biden himself who kept raising the issue about his garage that was locked with his 67 Corvette. And he wanted to talk about that. He was trying to distract people with his cool Corvette instead of the fact that no indication that when they were in that garage, that any more than the garage was locked, that they were actually behind it, like in a safe or anything. No, I think we would have heard that. Those documents were not safe in the Corvette garage. Come on. They were not.

Let's not. And nobody can say that having a little old Yale lock on your door with your Corvette backed up against a box of documents makes those documents safe because you treasure your car. You're going to treasure your documents. That's nonsense. And he attacked Trump for being for being totally irresponsible. That's not the case. Look, Jordan, you pointed out that archives and the Trump people were in the process of sorting out what belongs to us, what belongs to you, what is classified, what is not.

Boom, they get a search warrant. This didn't happen with Biden. This really bothers me in terms of being treated similarly situated in a dissimilar way.

In fact, Trump, because there was Secret Service protection, was even more careful in the handling of the documents than Biden was. So how can he make that statement? This is really very troubling to me. You know, and then Turley is right.

I agree with Turley and his comments entirely. Yeah, there's a second part to this, too, what Turley said, which is what we talked about a little bit earlier, which was, were people using these documents, including Joe Biden? Because that's a whole other issue. Why were they there? Right.

So, bite six. What we also know is that the documents that were removed when he left office were divided and distributed. Some went to one office, some to another. In the case of the third discovery, that was separated out.

The question is, why were they divided and distributed? If this was an inadvertent misplacement, it meant that they didn't have to, they didn't just do this inadvertently. They did do it repeatedly inadvertently. Right, which he's joking about there because, again, you have documents that were found in an office in DC.

Then you have some documents in the garage, but then you have documents in the office at the home as well. So, Andy, that would indicate that they were being utilized to some extent. They were. And let's be realistic. They were being utilized.

Let's not, I don't have evidence of it, but I have common sense in the reality of having lived in the world. And I know that they weren't there just sitting. They were being used. And as Turley says, they moved it around and they did it repeatedly inadvertently.

Repeatedly inadvertently, folks, translates to the word intentionally. And to me, this entire issue, Logan, is it's about, okay, listen, if you are going to weaponize this against Donald Trump, then you've got to be fair. And they're trying to look fair right now. I mean, we will have to watch it very closely. I think the House investigation, Jim Jordan said, you know, he said they are going to take their time here. They're not going to rush to have hearings right away.

They're going to take their time to get as much info. Because one thing that came out is the first set of documents, we learned about what they were about. We have no idea what the other documents were about. And I'm not sure we should have ever known what the first ones were about.

It just leaked out. And I think with this specific one, you do have to look at, at least maybe the intent, which is interesting. Because with the Trump documents, they were found in a mix of, all the documents were dumped in one spot.

Like you said, packed up and put there. The fact that these are kind of spread out in a different spot, that is not just a coincidence. And that is very odd that there would be just these spread out little boxes of documents throughout different properties, throughout different offices. Like you said, what were they being used for? Who knows if we'll find out, hopefully that we'll have some answers at some time.

Yeah. I mean, that's the goal is that ultimately you maybe find, you know, get more information because you've got a special counsel on this who will ultimately, at least at what has become the norm with these special counsels who don't necessarily bring criminal charges against folks, especially a sitting President, is reports. Like we saw with Mueller that they would go before Congress and have to explain.

I mean, we're nowhere near getting that report. But what we could be getting near is this significantly changing Joe Biden's future in politics because he was on, this all happened when he was on an upswing. He was going to, he was going to announce, I mean, still, that might be the plan next month that he was, and things were trending up the midterm elections, historically better than the incumbent ever does. And it's like, just as he was trending up, I don't think he's Republican by the way.

No, I don't think so either. I think it's like his own people started maybe, I mean, Democrats starting to sabotage from within, taking this national archives report, which was inaccurate and going, uh-oh, we may have some of these documents and we're not ours, they're really Obama's. And get out ahead of it a year and a half out. Yeah. And then you have time for special counsels.

Almost two years, yeah. So, I mean, how do you announce re-elected February when you got a special criminal investigation over your head? And you're Joe Biden.

I was like, some people do it. Yeah, but he's not that person. He's not Donald Trump.

And he tried to say, I'm the exact opposite. Be right back on Sekulow, ACLJ.org. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now, more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Welcome back to Sekulow, folks.

We are taking your phone calls to 1-800-684-3110. That's 1-800-684-3110 on this, again, this continuing information because we had Obama's ethics chief, so from the former Obama White House, blast by this, quote, inexcusable neglect of the most basic security protocols. And then went on to say it was, again, a breach of trust with the public, that breach of public trust, which is a huge statement coming from a fellow Democrat.

He tries to throw Trump in there, but that's becoming very difficult for Democrats. And even people that are just honest brokers because they say, whether you agree or disagree that Donald Trump should have those documents there, the where he had them was a lot more secure than where Joe Biden had them, which was in a garage with a Corvette or an empty office. Yeah, private home. You know, his private office in Delaware. And he had them for six years versus months.

Yeah. And why did the National Archives put out a release in October saying that, basically, we handle all these and this has all been done for Obama? Because if it'd been done for Obama, that would technically be these documents. So our FOIA specifically says, National Archives, did you just say we have everything? And like, forget about these documents that involved, at least we know, Ukraine, which was involved in war during the Obama administration, because remember the annexation of Crimea. Then you have the Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma. Now you have a war in Ukraine with Russia impacting all of the world.

So you do that. Iran, nuclear weapons program. Also, there were Americans imprisoned abroad, one that we represented. That was part of the Obama administration.

He had Iran. And the UK, when you have stuff on your allies, usually that's pretty interesting too. We know we spy on our allies and that's part of it. The Obama administration got caught multiple times spying on our allies at the highest level. So you look at all of that and you say, okay, we now have all of this information. At what point, the National Archives, Logan, said, they're bragging that they've responded to three FOIAs on Trump and they've provided the information. The question will be, are FOIA on Biden? Are they going to actually respond, which would be unusual for government agencies, but when it came to Trump...

They respond just sometimes they don't respond in the way that you would like them to. No, they say, we're not going to, or we're not... But under the...

There are reasons. The request on Trump though, and this is why I say the bureaucracy works in two different ways. On Trump, they didn't have to file a lawsuit to get it. They immediately started...

They've done three releases in just a matter of months. That is unheard of for the federal government. So our FOIA, which isn't asking for classified documents, it's asking for the communications you had when you closed the file, obviously, or did you close the file on Biden? Or did you know that he had these documents?

And why were you not informing the FBI about that then? And the question will be, is do they reply to us or do we have to... Now, ultimately, we will get the information. We'll sue them and take them to court if we have to. But it's another double standard potential that they better be careful not to cross, because now we've got direct reliance.

We can say, listen, you've made three records released on Donald Trump already, something that you had a lot less time on. So if they find us back, we can... Again, they're walking a dangerous path. Yeah. And that's why we have a whole team that's dedicated to this.

I think that's something we need to talk about more. The FOIA team. The FOIA team and the ACLJ. Make sure that you guys understand as listeners and viewers who watch the show and listen to the show, understand how important it is to make sure your voice is getting heard throughout our government, throughout YGC at the highest level, when there are situations like this, no one's asking these questions, but we are. Exactly. And folks, we're going to take your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110.

We come back too. We're getting into the debt ceiling, because with all these issues, you don't want to miss other issues that are going on that are going to impact you. The debt ceiling, so technically, I guess we run out of the... We cross over the ceiling Thursday, but we'll explain why it happened so quickly this time. There's issues to point to directly. Harry Hutchinson's going to join us.

We'll continue to take your calls to other documents. 1-800-684-3110 to join the conversation now as well, if you have questions about the debt ceiling and how Republicans are attempting to negotiate with Joe Biden. But of course, he's calling them fiscally demented. This is the unifier. The great unifier is calling Republicans fiscally demented. Interesting word choice by a guy who was saying happy birthday yesterday to no one.

Yeah, couldn't remember. I mean, someone, but... We'll talk about that on the secular brothers podcast. The podcast will be some of that fun stuff as well. Be right back on Sekulow.

Share it with your friends and family. Take one of your calls on the documents, and I do want to talk debt ceiling as well, and then we'll get to more documents as well. And we'll take your calls throughout this segment, the next segment of the broadcast. Charlene in Arizona online three. Hey Charlene. Hi. You're on the air. Yeah, hi.

Thanks for taking my call today. I just wanted to say that it's my opinion and probably millions of other American citizens' opinion that it's very obvious that all of the international allegations that we've all been hearing and talking about for the past couple of years with the Biden's interactions with Ukraine, China, Russia, Iran, it's all coming out in the evidence of paperwork that has been hidden in his garages and houses for years. This is all the paperwork for all the personal businesses that Biden did with the oligarchs of these countries and all the money that was taken from these countries. My only question is what did the Biden's promise to these oligarchs in return for this money? The Biden's are low-class scamming criminals and shouldn't be anywhere near the White House. Listen, I think, listen, we know what they did Charlene. When he was vice President he withheld a billion dollars from Ukraine. A billion dollars if they didn't fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company that his son was on the board of.

So I think, you know, that's important to point out is that, yeah, I mean let's play it. This is, so if you, just on that issue alone, not getting into all the China dealings, we know that with his brother, with Hunter as well, just on Ukraine, we know he was going to, he held over their head a billion dollars. Take a listen. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against a state prosecutor and they didn't. So they said they had, they were walking out to press conference and I said I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said you have no authority, you're not the President. The President said, I said, call him. I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars. I said, you're not getting the billion, I'm going to be leaving here. And I think it was what, six hours? I look at it, I said, I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.

Well, son, you got fired. Yeah. So I mean, there you go. I mean, there's one example. And we do know, as you pointed out, we know that there are documents on Ukraine, Iran and the UK. Well, we don't know if there's documents on China yet. We don't know what the others were. But right there, I think, is your example.

I want to go to Harry. We're talking about billion dollars, talking about a lot more than a billion dollars. We knew, Harry, that post, and this was the big discussion, is that after Kevin McCarthy secured the speakership, and we kind of moved on from that and the committees start forming, which they are right now, is that the next big fight was going to be the debt ceiling and Republicans' pledge not to raise the debt ceiling if we don't cut spending. Where does that stand right now? I mean, are we on the cusp of default? Because I'm sure the American people, I mean, they're worried about anything that could, again, impact our economy even worse.

I think that's correct. So technically, the debt ceiling expires this Thursday, I believe, at midnight. However, the Treasury Department has at its disposal extraordinary measures to push off a default, perhaps until this summer. But also keep in mind that represents an accelerated timetable from what we imagine many months ago. Why has the budget ceiling deadline accelerated? It has accelerated in large measure due to profligate spending by the Biden administration. So if you recall the $1.7 trillion spending contained in the so-called omnibus bill, that was a problem. If you look, for instance, at the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, you will find huge amounts of spending for health care and for climate change. Those particular expenditures, I would argue, are inflationary, even though the Democrats argue to the contrary that they reduce the deficit.

In addition to that, the Biden administration has postponed student loan repayments. All of these things are indeed inflationary, and so you can argue that the inflationary spending by left-wing Democrats is now coming home to roost. And so I think it would be a dereliction of duty by the Republicans to simply automatically raise the debt ceiling without having a serious conversation about profligate government spending. Yeah, and so the issue, though, is we've got Joe Biden. And I want to play this by, because this, I reference a part of it, the fiscally demented. But at an MLK event yesterday, when he was talking about the spending issue and this debt ceiling issue, remember, this is a guy who convinced people, don't vote for Donald Trump, vote for me because I'm going to make things more chill in Washington, we're going to work together, we're going to be more bipartisan, I'm not going to demonize Republicans, we're going to work together.

And take a listen to this in a speech during an MLK event by 26. We're going to talk about big spending Democrats again. Guess what?

I reduced the deficit last year. But so what? These guys are the fiscally demented, I think. They don't quite get it. So again, taking those kinds of potshots at Republicans when they do control the House now, Harry, and he does have to negotiate with them, it shows me he's not going to be unifying that this may be a real battle.

Absolutely. And one of the things that we can keep in mind and probably take to the bank with in the context of this debate is that President Biden often does not know what he is saying. So for instance, he takes credit for quote unquote, reducing the federal debt. But in fiscal year 2022, we ended with a $1.4 trillion deficit that consumes 5.5% of the United States gross domestic product. This has all fueled what? Higher interest rates, the highest interest rates arguably, the highest inflation in 40 years, and the highest interest rates in the last decade or so. And that accelerates the debt ceiling issue.

And so President Biden has massively contributed to the problems that the American people are experiencing. The American people are spending huge extra amounts of money on eggs, on fuel, on heating oil, you name it. Inflation is on the march that then fuels a rise in interest rates. That then accelerates the debt ceiling problems that the United States is experiencing.

Yeah. I mean, to me, what is unique here too is that, hey, we're at an economic time where people feel uncertain. And so if they start hearing from either side really that, oh, the debt ceiling is expiring, even though it can go on until June, and then you could have potential this idea of this shutdown talk, that impacts the bottom line, especially when we've got inflation at the levels we have, we don't have incomes are not rising at the levels of inflation. And so getting this right is very important at a time when it's economic uncertainty every day.

Absolutely. And this continues in terms of a lookout from the United States to, for instance, Western Europe. In France, for instance, many bakeries are experiencing a tenfold, that's a one thousand percent increase in electricity costs.

Butter is up by a hundred percent. And so all of these issues are combining to complicate the U.S. deficit spending and our debt ceiling debate. But Joe Biden, I think, often seems unaware. He continues to talk about bipartisanship, but yet he calls the Republicans demented.

And many Republicans may respond by suggesting that President Biden is simply being autobiographical. Yeah. Again, folks, we're going to continue to take your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. Now you've got calls on the documents.

I'm going to take one of those now as well. I want you to update it. What we do on this show is to make sure, again, all these other issues that are moving, you stay updated on. Let me go to this.

Rich in New York's been holding on. Hey, Rich. Hi, guys.

Thanks for having me on. Listen, this might be more appropriate for Secretary Pompeo or your national security team, but I expect that you guys could probably handle this question. I thought I heard a knock on my door. I'm sorry.

An apartment here in Buffalo. Okay. What was the portfolio of Vice President Biden in that I know he was given a lot of responsibilities, but his briefings, his intelligence briefings and others be more than what a secretary of state or even a CIA director or speaker of the House Intelligence Committee chairs and so on. In other words, what the likelihood of him taking really highly classified documents, which we know they were, but would be greater than what Hillary Clinton or any other secretary of state or Mike Pompeo could have taken home or even... I think so.

Yes, I think so. And the reason why is because their access to them. So if they were using classified documents, they were returning them as needed.

They were seeing them only as needed. The Vice President's portfolio, when Biden was Vice President member, he kind of was picked because of his experience and Obama's lack of experience. So his portfolio was foreign. So when you talk about foreign, you're talking about all the intel, you're talking about the wars, you're talking about your enemies. That's why I think all these documents are relating to foreign issues, not anything domestic that would have been classified.

Great question, we're gonna get answers. All right, still taking your phone calls on Sekulow. I know a lot on the documents, but I did want to update you on the debt ceiling issue because Joe Biden has thrown out that he's calling Republicans fiscally demented. Again, what a word to use by Joe Biden, don't have to go any deeper than that.

But again, this is the Mr. Unifier, that's all out the window now. He's got a special counsel investigating him for criminal conduct. Now you can't prosecute a sitting President, but you can prosecute people who work for him.

And ultimately here, just the drip, drip, drip about these documents has gotten just worse and worse than we had the National Archives released out in October, about three weeks before we know that the Biden team found out about the documents. But another part of this is bizarre, has been the private, as someone who has been a private lawyer for a President involving Mueller and impeachment, I can tell you what we don't do. We're not the ones going to a house, looking through documents to find out which ones, even if you get the right clearance, it's not your role because as a lawyer, you never want to become a witness to what you're supposed to be working on. You don't want to become someone who can get questioned because then you no longer can be your role as an attorney. So it kind of pierces the attorney-client relationship. Take a listen because Jonathan Turley also has raised this issue. It's like how many different times they have botched this in just a matter of weeks?

Take a listen. What was the role of these private lawyers? But that question gets far more serious after November 2nd. So after November 2nd, they have found highly classified documents. And the indication has been that at least some of these lawyers did not have clearances. And what was really surprising is in the last discovery where they said they overlooked some documents, one of the attorneys said that the prior attorneys did not have clearances. But that means that almost two months later, you were still using uncleared attorneys looking for documents that you know have contained highly classified documents. So what he's pointing out there is that the second time when you go to the house and you know what you're looking for is classified documents and you're sending attorneys there who are private attorneys, and now we have some of these saying, well, some didn't have the clearances, but don't worry, they didn't open the files.

That's not how this works. So not only did they become witnesses, they become potential targets of the investigation because if you don't have a clearance and you are knowingly handling, because that was what they were going to do is to go look for classified documents. And the idea was that they were going to find some.

And so you knew that you were going to be doing this and you might be handling them. That alone is criminal conduct. And again, I think that this has been overly weaponized. We have overclassification, we have weaponized documents, but we're not talking about, again, some six month dispute here between a former President who put everything behind a special lock and key at one place, which was Donald Trump. We're talking about Joe Biden, who looked like he was utilizing these documents over six years and saying, Hey, you know what?

I need this one in my office. And let's bring those to Delaware. Those can stay in Washington, DC at the Penn Biden center with the $54 million from China. And again, so like all these different acts that were intentional acts that weren't just accidents. And then on top of that, having attorneys without the proper clearance, having anybody go through is not following the rules. It's not following a common sense either. It's because it puts the attorney's relationship in jeopardy. Are they a witness? Are they a potential target now because of the handling of documents? And now that you've got a special counsel, their job is to, is to their starting point is not to say, did anything wrong happen here?

Was it criminal? You only appoint them to investigate crimes. So whatever the Biden administration wants to say about, you know, the special counsel is doing a review.

Yeah, it's not a review. It's a criminal investigation occurring right now on President Biden and his team. And that now includes a lot of these lawyers that are telling the press this, and this is coming up publicly. We know this information to be accurate. Now, what is interesting is how we found out about what the documents were initially.

And then later on, we're not getting as much. So it seems like they may have tapped down on some of the leaks, but, but what, what we have is attorneys talking about other attorneys. So you've got a bizarre team, obviously handling this, and they are reporting on each other.

That's when you start getting into just a mess. And it's something that as an attorney myself, you, you try to always keep yourself out of becoming a witness and at target you're being involved in what is being investigated that that's not your role. Your role is to protect your client, not to be involved, to be someone who is involved in the criminal conduct or potential criminal conduct that's being investigated as well. I want to go back to your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. Amy in New York online too. Hey, Amy.

Hey, thank you for taking my call. The question in my mind is in the Obama White House, um, who does the filing for President Obama, Obama, it seems that, um, President Obama is not going to be the one handling his own paperwork and doing the filing. Now, John Podesta was the chief of staff. So typically in a White House, there must be a standard structure and order that is followed when you close out the presidency, what documents qualify for archives and what documents don't.

And it seems that the actual President himself or the vice President in my mind there, unless you're President Trump, who we all know is very hands-on, but it seems like in my mind that the President and vice President hire people to do that kind of paperwork for them. So at the end of the administration, I mean, this has actually been discussed in light of what's happened with Biden is actually how messy of a process it is. Because, uh, what you have is a lot of staff has left at the end of an administration.

Okay. So if you know you've either lost or you've been reelected your second term, so you're done. So this, so you're, a lot of your senior staff is leaving and you're, a lot of this is being handled by young staffers who stay on or may have gone from intern to staff for like a two month period. And then they are the ones that start boxing up documents. And so, yes, there should have been someone probably in the White House counsel's office and someone that is, you know, someone that is more of a part of the White House bureaucracy works at like EEOB, the executive office building next to the White House that would then be making sure the right documents got to the right place. What is weird here is that we're talking about the vice President and his documents.

So why did he keep these and why were they in different locations? Because when they're in different locations, it, it, it, it begs that question of, they must've been there for intentionally because the ones that may be were at his home, where he campaigned from and, you know, this whole six year period, that those would have been somehow utilized, which would, which raises a whole nother issue with, of criminal conduct if he was in fact utilizing the, the way that, using these documents in a way he shouldn't been, which he shouldn't have even had them. So I think that there is probably moving forward, every President now moving forward is going to handle this process a lot better. And, and maybe that's probably a good thing for our country because instead of having kids handle this, you've got to have a team that is really in place at Sears so that you don't have to have these disputes over records. And if you declassified something, make it clear that it is declassified. If it's classified, make sure it's being returned to the proper source. And again also the National Archives role, you know, that's where our FOIA is on. Why did they for six years not ask for these documents?

That's a huge question as well. I mean, but Karl Rove said on Fox this morning, and he certainly knows about the end of every presidency is very chaotic in those last few days. We're going to talk about it a little more chaotic too at the border. There is a growing push being set up by three different house committees and members of Congress are speaking openly about it.

Not anonymously to impeach Mayorkas, which is very unique to impeach a cabinet member because usually if they were performing that badly, they would be removed by the President. So we're going to talk about that tomorrow on the broadcast a lot. We'll see more of these documents. Go to ACLJ.org. Mike Pompeo is going to be joining us tomorrow as well.

The national security implications here. ACLJ.org. Support our work financially. Make a donation today.

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