Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed The Epoch Times reporter, Nathan Worcester to the newsmaker line to discuss his recent article addressing bias at the National Archives and links to the Penn Biden center document scandal.
Leahy: All-star panelist, Gary Chapman in studio. And on our newsmaker line right now with The Epoch Times. Nathan Worcester. I think I got it. Nathan, how do you pronounce your last name?
Worcester: Exactly as you pronounced it. Worcester. Very good.
Leahy: Very good. Worcester, Massachusetts.
Chapman: Not, up there. It’s Worcester.
Leahy: Worcester. Nathan what a great story you have at The Epoch Times. Headline: Background Reviews of Top Officials Support Allegations of Bias at the National Archives. Tell us about what you’ve written here.
Worcester: The National Archives has been at the center of the Biden documents scandal. It was also at the center of the Trump documents case. And so, naturally, I wanted to look into the allegations of partisan bias. That’s a concern that James Comer, who’s leading the House Oversight Committee, and the inquiry into what has happened with the classified documents from President Biden’s vice presidency, he’s concerned about that.
So examining a little more closely the histories and the recorded comments from some of these top officials. For example, the lead counsel for NARA, Gary Stern, who has been with the agency for more than two decades, the Acting National Archivist Debra Steidel-Wall, and then the nominee, all of them have a very strong history of partisan statements.
A look at federal elections data shows that there’s almost a strikingly uniform partisan pattern in who these employees of the National Archives donate to. There’s a lot of evidence, frankly, that I’m still assembling to form and even fold a picture of what this agency looks like and what some of the top officials may or may not have had in mind at particular times. But it sort of goes to show the depths of what some people call The Swamp.
Leahy: And what’s interesting is they’ve treated current President Joe Biden more favorably than they’ve treated former President Donald Trump. I think that’s the bottom line here, isn’t it?
Worcester: Yes. I think that you look at the entire record of what we know so far, and frankly, we don’t know enough. And part of the reason we don’t know enough is the lack of transparency and the fact that Biden’s lawyers have been essentially allowed to look into these documents that are being recovered even according to their timeline, which, again, we still don’t fully know.
And this is the sort of thing that, for example, the House Committee on Weaponization of Government and the Oversight Committee, and other committees should attempt to get to the bottom of through subpoenas. But, yes, it would seem as though there are concerns about the unfairness that have not been resolved.
There has now been an FBI search directed at at least one location. On the other hand, this was apparently a consensual search. This was not a raid by any standards, unlike what some people have said about the Mar-a-Lago search.
Leahy: Andrew McCarthy, as you know, writes at the National Review and former Assistant U.S. Attorney. Very well known. He wrote something interesting. And let me just share this with you and then kind of get your reaction. What he noted was that sort of the public statement here is that Biden’s personal attorneys just happened to stumble across on November second, some documents that were classified in a locked closet.
They claim there was no Corvette there at the Penn Biden Center at 101 Constitution Avenue which is largely financed by anonymous Chinese donations through the University of Pennsylvania. The story is the attorney’s told the White House and the White House told the National Archives, and the National Archives then told the Department of Justice.
Except, wait, there’s more. (Chapman chuckles) Turns out, according to Andrew McCarthy, it wasn’t any of these sorts of left-leaning officials at the National Archives that told the Department of Justice on November fourth. It was the Inspector General for the National Archives. Have you followed that part of the story?
Worcester: No, that’s an incredibly important detail. I’ve been following, for example, that element. But really the thing that stood out to me was the October statement from NARA that any claims of documents having been mishandled by the Obama-Biden presidency or other presidencies were false and misleading. This was the line they were running with at that point in time.
Leahy: In October.
Worcester: Yep. Less than a month prior to when these documents were supposedly first discovered.
Leahy: You said something very important. Supposedly first discovered. I look at this and do you suggest that there were more documents known and discovered prior to November second?
Worcester: I would again say that honestly, the timeline so far, I think one reason why it’s so difficult to follow is that we have to recover more information through, hopefully, things like the Freedom of Information Act requests, hopefully through House subpoenas.
I would say it doesn’t exactly surprise me, this notion that some people seem to share, the belief that there’s probably more than we have been told. Just the timing around when this information was made public, the timing around the apparent involvement of Lausch’s appointee for the special counsel Hur.
It still doesn’t really add up. And I’m really hoping that over the next few weeks, we’ll get to the answer before this is moved away from the news cycle even further. I looked at my Google News feed this morning and of course, anything related to the Biden documents is down at the bottom.
Leahy: Yes, of course. Now, the other news on Friday, the Department of Justice searched the Wilmington residence of Joe Biden, and then Saturday, his personal attorney announced that they discovered six more classified documents at his residence, some of which, wait for it…some of this dated from his time in the United States Senate.
To me, that is a dramatic difference from documents during his time as V.P. Arguably, he could say, well, an executive order from 2009 President Obama allowed him to declassify. I think that’s arguable. But there’s no defense for having classified documents from his time in the Senate. Your thoughts?
Worcester: Yes. There’s even more to it than that, because as I understand it, this wasn’t necessarily six classified documents. These were six items. Six items in some of the FBI terminology that could refer to six boxes full of who knows how many documents are in there.
Leahy: Gary Chapman has a question for you.
Chapman: No, I just didn’t know that. I didn’t know that there was a possibility that it was more than it appeared on the surface.
Leahy: Six items could be six boxes. That’s what you’re saying could possibly be.
Worcester: Yes.
Chapman: Wow.
Worcester: I think it’s going to be very important for journalists, hopefully, I am one of them, but other journalists to really over the next few weeks as this is released, I think in a fairly strategic way to continue to piece together the timeline and make sure that that sort of crafty legalese doesn’t slip through the cracks.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Nathan Worcester” by Nathan Worcester. Background Photo “United States Capitol” by Paula Nardini.
