Within hours of the release of a special prosecutor’s report finding he “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” as a private citizen, President Biden rushed to the White House podium to blame his former “staff.”
“I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,” the president maintained.
Like Biden, these staffers have avoided any criminal charges. Who are they?
Without identifying them by name, special counsel Robert Hur narrowed the suspects to two former aides: “Executive Assistant” and “Staff Assistant 3.”
He said they gathered up more than 180 classified records totaling more than 600 pages and packed them into 15 boxes as Biden left the White House in January 2017.
Gatekeepers
Documents confirm that the staffers in question are Kathy S. Chung, who worked with Hunter Biden at the Commerce Department, and Anne Marie Muldoon, nee Person, who worked for him at Rosemont Seneca Partners, a key pass-through for foreign wire payments to Hunter Biden.
Chung and Muldoon were the two most important people in Joe Biden’s office suite. They were the gatekeepers who controlled the front office that adjoined his West Wing office, and they stored his classified papers in file cabinets and in his safe.
Biden trusted them implicitly since they came to him on the recommendation of his son Hunter.
In effect, it was Hunter who placed them in their sensitive posts inside the White House, where they had unfettered access to “the most highly classified, sensitive, and compartmented materials recovered during our investigation,” Hur noted in his report.
And they continued to communicate with Hunter throughout their tenure in his father’s office, assisting his foreign business schemes, according to emails obtained from his abandoned laptop and from the National Archives.
Recommended
Hunter got his old Commerce colleague Chung her White House job in 2012, the year before Hunter traveled with the vice president on Air Force Two to Beijing to seal a lucrative investment deal with the Chinese. Chung booked the trip, records show.
The executive assistant post opened up in his father’s office in May 2012, and Hunter proposed his old chum take it.
He described the job as replacing the “primary gatekeeper for the VP [and the] conduit everyone goes through to get to [Joe Biden].” In addition, she’d handle “all personal stuff” for the vice president, according to Hunter’s email to Chung.
That meant, as it turned out, acting as the custodian of all of Biden’s White House records, including classified material. Chung was thrilled to be considered for the position, which required Top Secret security clearance — “Thanks for calling and thinking of me,” she emailed Hunter — and agreed to an interview.
“I just met with your Dad again and he officially offered me the job,” she gushed in a June 13, 2012, email to Hunter. “I cannot thank you enough for thinking about me and walking me thru this.”
Then in mid-2014, Hunter recommended Muldoon for the job of Chung’s assistant. At the time, she was working as Hunter’s aide at Rosemont Seneca. Her husband, Mike Muldoon, had also worked for Hunter at Rosemont Seneca years earlier.
Family business
Records show Chung and Muldoon still arranged overseas trips for Hunter Biden and his Rosemont partners while working in VP Biden’s office. They sent and received hundreds of emails with Hunter and Rosemont.
Between July 2012 (when Chung came aboard) and April 2015, the latest data available, Rosemont Seneca shows up in a whopping 921 emails generated from the vice president’s office, according to a recent partial release of Vice President Biden’s records by the National Archives concerning “Hunter Biden, James Biden and their foreign business dealings.”
The records reveal that, among other things, Chung and Muldoon fielded requests from Hunter for signed photos of Joe Biden, letters from the vice president for his associates and tickets to White House events, including several state dinners and luncheons with foreign leaders.
In September 2015, for example, Chung emailed Hunter to invite him to a lunch with Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted by Biden.
In August 2016, according to Secret Service visitor logs, Muldoon escorted into the West Wing James Bulger — nephew of the notorious Irish mobster Whitey Bulger — after Bulger and Hunter formed BHR Partners, an investment fund controlled by the state-owned Bank of China.
A month after Chung oversaw the removal of the secret vice presidential papers in 2017, Hunter Biden attempted to poach her to work for him directly.
“Come work with me,” he wrote, “so that I can make everybody money.”
At the time, Hunter was courting Chinese businessmen who ended up paying him and other Biden family members $6 million for unspecified services.
Though Chung said she was interested in Hunter’s offer, she ultimately stayed on as Joe Biden’s assistant at his new digs at the Penn Biden Center in DC, where Hunter had VIP access.
It was there that Biden’s classified docs were first “discovered” by his lawyers, who were concerned about his own liability after the Justice Department raided former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida and seized boxes of classified papers.
Cozy relationship
Chung told Hur she never noticed any classified papers among the records she packed and unpacked, before filing them in unlocked cabinets and closets in Biden’s unlocked office, according to Hur.
Just weeks before she and Muldoon boxed up Biden’s records, however, they received a Jan. 3, 2017, email from the National Security Council warning them not to pack anything classified and that “only unclassified personal records” could be removed from the White House at the end of the administration, noted Hur, who ultimately punted on indicting either of them, even for gross negligence.
A lawyer for Chung — who now serves as a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — did not respond to requests for comment. Attempts to reach Muldoon were unsuccessful.
The issue of Hunter Biden’s cozy relationship with these aides could break into the open during Hur’s March 12 testimony on the Hill. Sources say lawmakers will press him on whether he investigated Hunter or his uncle Jim to see if either of them gained access to the stolen White House docs.
Last week, the House Oversight Committee, as part of its joint impeachment inquiry, subpoenaed the attorney general for Hur’s investigative files, including recovered classified documents about Ukraine and China.
In a statement, the panel said it is “concerned that President Biden may have retained sensitive documents related to specific countries involving his family’s foreign business dealings.”
Sperry is a senior investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. Follow him on X: @paulsperry_
This story originally appeared on NYPost
