CNN’s Daniel Dale pushed back on three false claims made by President Joe Biden at his Thursday press conference held to address Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified materials.
In an appearance on CNN News Central Friday morning, Dale turned first to Biden’s claim that “all the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.”
“Just not true, John,” Dale told host John Berman. “This report from the special counsel includes photos. Those photos include shots of a box just sitting in President Biden’s Delaware garage. The special counsel described it as a badly damaged box sitting amid household detritus. So there was some material that was in cabinets, locked or lockable as the president said, but all of it certainly not. And that open, unsealed damaged box included, according to the special counsel, highly sensitive top secret material about the war in Afghanistan.”
Next, he addressed Biden’s insistence that none of the material was “high classified.”
“That claim that he didn’t have any material that was quote, unquote, ‘high classified’ is also not true, John. The special counsel’s report says that the president possessed multiple highly classified documents that were indeed marked as being highly classified documents, including some marked as Top Secret/SCI, Sensitive Compartmented Information. That is a very high level of classification,” noted Dale. “Whatever coloring these documents had, the special counsel says they were clearly marked as highly classified.”
And finally, he debunked Biden’s assertion that Hur did not allege that Biden shared classified information with his ghostwriter.
“So he’s [Biden] entitled to say he didn’t do it, he can defend himself. But he also said the special counsel didn’t say that he did share that classified info with the ghostwriter. Except, John, the special counsel did say that explicitly. Hur wrote, quote, ‘Mr. Biden shared information, including some classified information from those notebooks with his ghostwriter.’ So there it is in black and white,” explained Dale.