An Amtrak Auto Train was severely delayed due to a freight derailment that occurred Monday night.
One woman told Insider about how the train, filled with irate passengers, began to run out of water.
There was also defecation found in one of the bathroom floors, she said.
Mary-Jane Crowley and her husband Mike expected to arrive at their Florida destination by Tuesday morning aboard the Amtrak Auto Train leaving from northern Virginia.
The Auto Train is a 900-mile train service that goes from Lorton, Virginia, to Sanford, Florida. As a motorail, it allows passengers to transport their vehicles — be it an SUV, a motorcycle, or a jetski — along for the ride. Amtrak advertises the service as a 17-and-a-half-hour journey, which cuts through rural scenes of North and South Carolina.
Amenities include café service, pet accommodations, and, with a first-class upgrade, bedroom suites with a private restroom and shower. Riders with rooms can also get a restaurant experience in the dining car.
Crowley opted for coach, noting that the seats were comfortable enough. But by late Monday evening, several hours after the train’s departure, the Greenville, New York, resident, said the ride slowly unraveled into a 37-hour “Twilight Zone” moment of frustration and confusion.
“I will not be going on another train, that’s for sure,” she told Insider on Wednesday, exhausted from her long journey.
On Wednesday morning, Amtrak passengers finally arrived at the Sanford station after a 20-hour delay that was caused by a CSX freight derailment in South Carolina on Monday night. Amtrak told Insider that the incident forced the Auto Train to take a detour. On top of the new route, the train made a few stops to switch crew members and replenish food and water for the passengers.
This included an initial stop in Denmark, South Carolina, on Monday evening, as well as a stop in Savannah, Georgia, and another in Jacksonville, Florida, for pizza, an Amtrak spokesperson told The New York Times.
About 563 passengers were aboard the southbound train, ABC News reported. During the 20-hour delay, passengers recalled the train being stranded in the woods and at one point feeling as if they were being held hostage. (A conductor had to reassure riders that that was not the case.)
One frustrating part of the whole ordeal was the lack of communication from the staff, Crowley said.
She recalled the train stalling a few times on Monday night, wondering, “What is going on?” But it wasn’t until the following Tuesday morning that passengers were told why the train was repeatedly being delayed, she said.
An Amtrak spokesperson told The Times that a CSX freight train hit an unoccupied vehicle in Lake City, South Carolina, before 11 p.m. on Monday. CSX told the newspaper that 25 rail cars and two trains derailed. There were no injuries, according to the report.
On Tuesday, passengers also faced a long stretch of immobility that lasted about five hours, from around 3 to 8 p.m., according to Crowley.
She didn’t know exactly where they were but noticed that the train was stalled somewhere in the woods. (One passenger shared a video of being stuck in the middle of rural South Carolina.)
At one point, during the long stop, Crowley spotted people outside of the train holding flashlights. Some of the older folks feared that the people were going to rob the train, Crowley said.
“Well, they can break in, and we can get out — because we can’t get out of this place,” Crowley recalled joking to herself.
By Tuesday afternoon, Crowley said the frustration really settled in and emotions were running high.
“People were really pissed,” she said. “Really pissed. It was about that time.”
Food and water supplies were running low, Crowley said. Another passenger shared with ABC News’ Sam Sweeney that there were “no more meals” on the train.
“We were buying stuff, we paid for stuff, ” Crowley noted. “They weren’t giving it to us except for a box with some crackers and stuff in it.”
In Crowley’s car, a mother with a crying baby was at her wit’s end when she realized she may be running out of diapers. Older passengers were worried about their medications; and there was a concern for two therapy dogs whowere stuck on the train. (One passenger, Hannah Dore, told The Times that crew members allowed her service dog to relieve herself several times.)
Crowley quietly feared that, at any moment, someone could blow up in frustration.
One of the therapy dogs that were aboard the Amtrak Auto Train.
Mary-Jane Crowley
An Amtrak spokesperson previously told Insider that “customers were provided regular updates, along with meals, snack packs, and beverages. Additional food from local businesses along the route was also provided during the trip.”
Perhaps one of the lower moments of the prolonged trip was when one bathroom had defecation on the floor. Someone attempted to clean up the mess, Crowley said.
“Nobody could get off of this train,” she said. “There were people who were starting to get irate and say things. Some were talking about a class-action lawsuit.”
Crowley and another person also had the idea to reach out to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. One Twitter user tweeted at him, saying that the situation was “ridiculous” and could get “dangerous.”
Crowley compared the train ride to a “bizarre movie.”
By around 6 a.m. Wednesday, the Amtrak train arrived at its final destination. It would be a few hours, after running a few errands, before Crowley could rest at her home in Naples, Florida.
Everything to know about Open AI’s viral chat bot Chat GPT.
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Open AI, the AI company behind the AI art generator DALL·E, released the viral bot Chat GPT.
The bot, which drew more than 1 million users soon after its launch, is attracting more investors to generative AI.
If you haven’t followed the GPT craze, here’s how it works and which experiments are using it to replace humans.
Since Open AI released its blockbuster bot Chat GPT in November, the tool has sparked ongoing casual experiments, including some by Insider reporters trying to simulate news stories or message potential dates.
To older millennials who grew up with IRC chat rooms — a text instant message system — the personal tone of conversations with the bot can evoke the experience of chatting online. But Chat GPT, the latest in technology known as “large language model tools,” doesn’t speak with sentience and doesn’t “think” the way people do.
That means that even though Chat GPT can explain quantum physics or write a poem on command, a full AI takeover is not imminent, according to experts.
“There’s a saying that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually give you Shakespeare,” said Matthew Sag, a law professor at Emory University who studies copyright implications for training and using large language models like Chat GPT.
“There’s a large number of monkeys here, giving you things that are impressive — but there is intrinsically a difference between the way that humans produce language, and the way that large language models do it,” he said.
Chat bots like GPT are powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques to make predictions about stringing words together in a meaningful way. They not only tap into a vast amount vocabulary and information, but also understand words in context. This helps them mimic speech patterns while dispatching an encyclopedic knowledge.
Other tech companies like Google and Meta have developed their own large language model tools, which use programs that respond to human prompts and devise sophisticated responses. Open AI, in a revolutionary move, also created a user interface that is letting the general public experiment with it directly.
Some recent efforts to use chat bots for real-world service have proved troubling — with odd results. The mental health company Koko came under fire this month after its founder wrote about how the company used GPT-3 in an experiment to reply to users.
Koko co-founder Rob Morris hastened to clarify on Twitter that users weren’t speaking directly to a chat bot, but that AI was used to “help craft” responses.
The founder of the controversial DoNotPay service, which claims its GPT-3 driven chat bot helps users resolve customer service disputes, also said an AI “lawyer” would advise defendants in actual courtroom traffic cases in real time.
Other researchers seem to be taking more measured approaches with generative AI tools. Daniel Linna Jr., a professor at Northwestern University who works with the non-profit Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, researches the effectiveness of technology in the law. He told Insider he’s helping to experiment with a chat bot called “Rentervention,” which is meant to support tenants.
The bot currently uses technology like Google Dialogueflow, another large language model tool. Linna said he’s experimenting with Chat GPT to help “Rentervention” come up with better responses and draft more detailed letters, while gauging its limitations.
“I think there’s so much hype around Chat GPT, and tools like this have potential,” said Linna. “But it can’t do everything — it’s not magic.”
Open AI has acknowledged as much, explaining on its own website that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”
Read Insider’s coverage on Chat GPT and some of the strange new ways companies are using chat bots:
The incident occurred at a Tesla centre in Maryland (not pictured).
Michael Siluk/Getty Images
A woman sued Tesla for $2 million after she was struck by a car driven by a worker at a dealership.
Rakshinda Parvez was waiting while her family test-drove a Tesla, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claimed she suffered multiple injuries, but Tesla disputed her account of the incident.
A woman waiting while her family was test-driving a Tesla was hit by another car driven by a worker at the dealership, a lawsuit says.
Rakshinda Parvez, from New York, was struck in the parking lot at a Tesla center in Baltimore, Maryland, in March 2019, according to a lawsuit filed in March last year.
She walked behind a Tesla driven by an employee that had stopped at the parking lot exit, an amended complaint filed in November stated.
The car then reversed “suddenly and without warning,” resulting in concussion as well as neurological, disc, and other orthopedic injuries to Parvez, the lawsuit alleged. It accused the employee of failing to reverse safely and pay proper attention.
Parvez sought damages of at least $2 million, excluding legal costs, according to her lawyer, Craig Meyers.
In its response, Tesla disputed Parvez’s account of the incident and said her injuries were caused by “unforeseeable” acts.
The company’s counterclaim sought to cover its legal costs defending the lawsuit.
A federal criminal investigation that began in 2021 is considering Tesla’s claim to offer “full-self driving capabilities” defrauds consumers.
Elon Musk’s company also faces another federal investigation into “phantom braking.” An eight-car pileup in the San Francisco Bay Area last month was believed to have been caused by the problem, CNN reported.
Representatives for Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Warren Buffett plowed $5 billion into Bank of America during the US debt-ceiling crisis in 2011.
The famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO had the idea to invest while taking a bath.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway counts Bank of America as its number-two holding after Apple.
Warren Buffett struck one of the must lucrative deals of his career when he agreed to inject $5 billion into Bank of America during the US debt-ceiling crisis in 2011.
Here’s the story of how the billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO shored up confidence in of America’s biggest banks and made a fortune in the process.
A bathtub, a call center, and a billion-dollar deal
Buffett was taking a bath in late August 2011, reflecting on his investments in American Express and Geico during difficult periods for both companies, when he had the idea to bet on Bank of America, Fortune reported at the time.
Soon after, the investor picked up the phone and tried to get through to the bank’s CEO, Brian Moynihan. He was initially thwarted by a call-center worker.
“Warren asked to speak to me and of course they don’t transfer everybody who calls the call centers to the CEO’s line,” Moynihan told Bloomberg in 2019.
Buffett eventually got through to Moynihan and proposed an investment in his company. Moynihan replied that Bank of America didn’t need the capital.
“I know, that’s why I’m calling,” Buffett responded, adding that accepting his money would provide stability, a stamp of approval, and a cash cushion.
Moynihan agreed, and the pair signed a deal less than 24 hours after speaking for the first time. Buffett’s cash landed in Bank of America’s account a couple of days later.
Warren gets his warrants
Buffett and Moynihan agreed that Berkshire would invest $5 billion in cash to Bank of America, in return for $5 billion worth of preferred shares, which were redeemable at a 5% premium and paid a 5% annual dividend.
Berkshire also received stock warrants granting it the right to buy 700 million of the bank’s common shares at a price of $7.14 per share. The warrants could be exercised at any point over the next decade.
The deal terms echoed Buffett’s bailouts of Goldman Sachs and General Electric during the 2008 financial crisis. The investor demanded preferred stock and warrants in those deals too.
Buffett outlined his rationale for betting on Bank of America in his 2011 shareholder letter.
“Some huge mistakes were made by prior management,” he said. “Brian Moynihan has made excellent progress in cleaning these up.”
The bank chief was “nurturing a huge and attractive underlying business that will endure long after today’s problems are forgotten,” Buffett continued, adding that Berkshire’s warrants “will likely be of great value before they expire.”
The investor waited to use the warrants until the annual dividends from 700 million common shares exceeded the $300 million in yearly income that Berkshire was receiving from its preferred stock.
He exercised all of the warrants in August 2017, and covered the $5 billion cost of doing so by giving up virtually all of Berkshire’s preferred shares.
The common shares it received were worth over $20 billion at the end of 2017, meaning Berkshire more than tripled its money on paper, even before accounting for the dividends it received.
Berkshire has boosted the position since then to north of 1 billion shares, valued around $35 billion today. Buffett’s company is the the bank’s biggest shareholder with a roughly 13% stake, while Bank of America is Berkshire’s second-largest holding after Apple.
Buffett has been chasing another “eureka” moment ever since.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the bathtub since and nothing’s come to me,” he quipped at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in 2017.
“Clearly, I either need a new bathtub or we’ve got to get to a different kind of market,” he added.
Bill Gates took part in a Reddit Ask Me Anything on Wednesday.
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Bill Gates said being rich can “easily make you out of touch” during a Reddit Ask Me Anything.
The philanthropist said he “wouldn’t ban” anyone becoming a billionaire during his 11th AMA.
Gates also said on Reddit that the super-rich should pay more tax and give away their wealth.
Bill Gates admitted that being rich can “easily make you out of touch” during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Wednesday.
Reddit user mspalandas asked the Microsoft cofounder if it’s possible to have “ethical billionaires.”
Gates responded: “Being rich can easily make you out of touch. The incentive to create new companies is still a good thing I think. Even if taxes go up I still wouldn’t ban anyone from being worth a billion, but that is just one opinion. I have been very lucky.”
Gates invited Reddit users to pose questions related to his work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, what he’s excited about in 2023, or anything else, for his 11th AMA.
He had spent time contemplating what mattered most to him as the new year commenced, Gates said in the post, and that he recently learned he would become a grandfather this year.
Another user asked the billionaire why he was buying so much farmland and he shut down any suggestion that there’s a “grand scheme involved.” The question received close to 10,000 upvotes.
Gates said he owned less than 1/4,000th of US farmland and that he invested in agriculture to generate jobs and increase productivity.
He wrote: “In terms of the very rich I think they should pay a lot more in taxes and they should give away their wealth over time. It has been very fulfilling for me and is my full-time job.”
The philanthropist last year committed to giving away his fortune to the Gates Foundation. He established The Giving Pledge alongside Warren Buffett and Melinda Gates in 2010 to encourage billionaires to vow to give away most of their fortunes.
Last year only five billionaires pledged to join the list. The disgraced founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, also became a pledger in 2022, but he was later removed from the list and site after he was accused of fraud.
The Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
We are currently witnessing an unfolding revolution in global security that Western policy makers are clearly unprepared for — the impending collapse of the Russian Federation.
Instead of planning contingencies for external spillovers and capitalizing on Russia’s de-imperialization, however, Western officials appear to be stuck in a bygone era, believing they can return to the post-Cold War status quo, with some even offering Moscow security guarantees to keep the country intact.
But Russia is a failed state. It’s been unable to transform itself into a nation-state, a civic state or even a stable imperial state. It is a federation in name only, as the central government pursues a policy of ethnic and linguistic homogenization and denies any powers to the country’s 83 republics and regions. However, hyper-centralization has exposed the country’s multiple weaknesses, including a contracting economy squeezed by international sanctions, military defeats in Ukraine that reveal the incompetence and corruption of its ruling elite, and disquiet in numerous regions over their shrinking budgets.
Moscow is finally being exposed as a rapacious imperial center that’s exhausting its capacities to hold the country together. Yet, most Western leaders still fail to see the benefits of Russia’s disintegration.
The rupture of the Russian Federation will be the third phase of imperial collapse after the unravelling of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It’s driven by elite power struggles and intensifying rivalries between the central government and disaffected regions, which in some parts of the country, could lead to civil wars and border disputes. However, it will also embolden the emergence of new states and inter-regional federations, which will control their own resources and no longer send their men to die for Moscow’s empire.
As Moscow turns inward, its capacity for foreign aggression will diminish. And as a rump state, under intense international sanctions and shorn of its resource base in Siberia, it will have severely reduced capabilities to attack neighbors. From the Arctic to the Black Sea, NATO’s eastern front will become more secure; while Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova will regain their occupied territories, and petition for European Union and NATO integration without fear of Russia’s reaction.
Countries in Central Asia will also feel increasingly liberated, and they will be able to turn to the West for energy, security and economic connections. China will be in a weaker position to expand its influence as it can no longer collaborate with Moscow, and new pro-Western states can emerge from within the Russian federation, enhancing stability in several regions of Europe and Eurasia.
Although nuclear weapons will remain a potential threat, Russia’s leaders won’t commit national suicide by launching them against the West. Instead, they will try to salvage their political futures and economic fortunes — as did the Soviet elite. And even if some emerging states acquire such weapons, they won’t have any reason to deploy them while seeking international recognition and economic assistance. Post-Russian states are instead likely to pursue nuclear disarmament — much like Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan after the Soviet demise.
The notion that Western leaders only help President Vladimir Putin by talking about Russia’s collapse is misleading. The Kremlin claims the West wants to destroy Russia regardless of actual policy, and denials from Washington and Brussels simply fuel Kremlin conspiracies.
Rather, a much more effective approach would be to clearly specify what the West supports. Openly backing pluralism, democracy, federalism, civil rights and the autonomy of its republics and regions can help embolden Russia’s citizens by demonstrating they aren’t globally isolated. They will also need access to the information that Moscow suppresses, especially when it comes to providing security, economic development and cultivating peaceful, productive relations with neighbors.
Even after the horrors of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the justifications the country’s government leaders and advisers have given for genocide, Western officials’ hope that beneficial relations can be established with a post-Putin Kremlin, or that liberals can democratize the empire, is wishful thinking.
The West made a grave mistake when it assumed the collapse of Soviet communism meant the end of Russian imperialism. And as imperial states invariably collapse when they overreach and when centrifugal pressures are fueled by economic distress, regional resentments and national revivals, it must now avoid repeating that mistake — this time by wrongly presuming the current empire is permanent.
The party drug MDMA earned positive results for treating people living with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a new government study that confirmed other findings.
The new study for the MDMA clinical trial program was completed in November and sponsored by a group called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The trial is part of an ongoing effort to obtain federal approval for use of MDMA in therapy as the number of people suffering from PTSD, mental illness, and opioid addiction continues to climb.
Prior to federal criminalization of the use and possession of MDMA in 1985, the substance had been legally used in therapy treatments for at least a decade. As part of its decision to criminalize MDMA, the Drug Enforcement Administration said abuse of the substance had “become a nationwide problem” and posed “a serious health threat.”
MDMA is only one of a handful of drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, that the federal government considered to be largely for recreational purposes — and therefore illegal — that are now slowly progressing toward government approval for legal uses. The drugs, among them psilocybin, which is found in “magic mushrooms,” are being studied for therapeutic uses.
The Biden administration has signaled willingness to explore the potential to use criminalized substances to address a growing national mental health crisis, and officials in Congress have undertaken bipartisan efforts to ease access to federally banned substances for therapeutic uses. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ latest clinical research on MDMA is a phase three study aimed at eventually winning Food and Drug Administration approval.
The stigma against psychedelic and psychoactive drugs and the residual effects of the “war on drugs” kicked off by President Richard Nixon have stalled progress in one of the few areas of drug policy on which there is substantial bipartisan consensus.
In May, the Department of Health and Human Services said it anticipated that the FDA would approve both MDMA and psilocybin for treatment of PTSD and depression, respectively, within the next two years. President Joe Biden’s administration has supported the creation of a federal task force to explore potential issues with psychedelic and entactogenic medicines. The White House did not immediately provide comment on the status of the task force or efforts to obtain FDA approval for either substance.
In July, Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced a bill that would let people with terminal illnesses access drugs classified under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act that have undergone a phase one clinical trial but have not yet received FDA approval. The bill was supported by the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, which includes several organizations that work to prevent suicide and deaths of despair among veterans and and nonveterans alike. The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 20. (Spokespersons for Booker and Paul did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Last summer, the House also moved to expand research into psychedelic therapy. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, offered amendments to the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would relax federal restrictions on the use of psychedelic treatments for veterans and active-duty service members struggling with mental illness.
President Biden is facing a Department of Justice investigation after his lawyers found classified documents at his Delaware residence and an office in Washington, D.C.
“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said Thursday.
The announcement comes three days after news broke that classified documents had been found at Biden’s private office in November less than a week before the midterm elections – a discovery that led the DOJ to launch an initial inquiry.
In response to Garland’s announcement Thursday, the White House said it has “cooperated closely” with the DOJ during its review and plans to continue working with Hur’s special counsel investigation, according to a statement from Richard Sauber, a lawyer for the president.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” according to the statement.
On Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “takes classified information, classified documents very seriously” and that his office will cooperate with the special counsel as it has been doing with the Department of Justice.
Here’s what we know about the Biden documents so far:
On three occasions, classified documents were found at Biden’s private residence and a D.C. office he used before becoming president.
Early last November, Biden’s personal lawyers were packing files from his one-time office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank founded in 2018 by the University of Pennsylvania where Biden served as a fellow and professor before he became president.
There, in a “locked closet,” the White House says, they discovered some files that were marked as classified, even though the office had not been authorized for the storage of classified documents. The documents were quickly turned over to the National Archives.
Then, on Nov. 4, the National Archives inspector general informed the Department of Justice of the discovery. In mid-November, Garland tapped John Lausch, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Chicago, to begin an initial investigation.
In December, after a review that began after the November discovery, Biden’s personal counsel Robert Bauer informed Lausch that another set of documents had been found in the garage of Biden’s private home in Wilmington, Del. Those documents were soon secured by the FBI.
Finally, on Wednesday night, Biden’s team discovered one more classified document at Biden’s Wilmington home.
The White House says it was unintentional and that they will cooperate fully.
Biden has said that he takes the handling of classified information seriously and that he is “cooperating fully and completely” with the Justice Department.
“They found some documents in a box in a locked cabinet, or at least a closet. And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box. And they did what they should have done,” Biden said earlier this week, after the first reports about the documents in the D.C. office.
On Thursday, after reports that more documents were discovered at his Delaware garage, Biden turned defensive when pressed by a reporter. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage. OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street,” he said.
The White House says Biden does not know the content of the documents.
Still, the White House was hardly forthcoming about the existence of a second set of documents. When it confirmed the first discovery in the D.C. office, there was no mention of the second batch recovered in Delaware. It was only after news reports that revealed the later discovery did the White House acknowledge it.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” Sauber said in a statement Thursday.
We don’t know what was in the documents, or how many were found.
The documents are classified, so they have not been publicly described, beyond that they were records that dated to Biden’s time as vice president during the Obama administration.
A special counsel will oversee the investigation.
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to take charge of the DOJ’s investigation, calling the events “extraordinary circumstances.” The investigation will be conducted following the department’s rules, but the special counsel operates independently of day-to-day oversight from the Justice Department — an arrangement designed to avoid even the suggestion of interference.
Robert Hur, the special counsel, is a longtime prosecutor who served, at the appointment of then-President Donald Trump, as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland from 2018 to 2021. He has previously worked on a variety of national security, public corruption and corporate fraud cases.
“This appointment underscores for the public the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said Thursday.
The Hur appointment follows Garland’s decision last November to tap former war crime prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel in a pair of cases involving former President Trump, including his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, criticized the Biden administration over its handling of the classified document situation in a press conference Thursday.
Critics have accused Biden of hypocrisy and say he should have publicized the discovery sooner.
Critics of Biden, including many Republicans, have seized on the revelations to raise new complaints about the Biden administration’s handling of the Trump classified document saga, including the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.
“Another faux pas by the Biden administration by treating law differently based upon your political beliefs. Treats President Trump one way but treats President Biden a whole different way,” said Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a press conference Thursday.
McCarthy and others have also said that Biden should have disclosed the discovery sooner: The first documents were discovered on Nov. 2, just six days before last fall’s midterm elections.
Republicans have already vowed to use their new House majority to probe Biden’s handling of the classified documents and how federal agencies responded.
On Friday, Republican House Judiciary members sent a letter to the attorney general announcing their inquiry into the handling of the documents and the appointment of Hur. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., demanded “all documents and communications” between the DOJ, FBI and White House related to the “mishandling of the classified documents” and the appointment of the special counsel.
And Trump himself has hammered Biden over the documents on his social media site Truth Social. “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” he wrote Monday.
There are parallels with the Trump classified documents saga, but the two situations are not identical.
The Presidential Records Act requires that all presidential (and vice presidential) documents be turned over to the National Archives upon the end of an administration. Other rules govern the storage of classified documents.
Now, both presidents have run afoul of those rules.
But from what we know so far, there are already important differences between how the two have handled their respective situations.
In the case of former President Donald Trump, the National Archives was the first to identify the missing documents and request their return.
Trump initially resisted returning them, and his lawyers at times misled federal investigators. After months of back-and-forth between the government and Trump aides, 15 boxes of documents were returned in January 2022. According to the FBI, the boxes included 184 classified documents, including 25 marked “Top Secret,” as well as others denoted with labels indicating they contained national security information, such as “FISA.” But more documents still remained at Mar-a-Lago, and ultimately the FBI raided the resort in August to retrieve the rest.
By contrast, Biden’s team appears to have found what Sauber described as a “small amount” of documents first, then returned them to the federal government promptly.
Still, the revelations about improperly stored documents and the appointment of a special counsel are an “embarrassment” to the Biden administration, said Leon Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration and as Secretary of Defense under President Obama
“It’s both an embarrassment and damaging to the credibility of the White House, because obviously the president has criticized former president Trump and the way he handled classified documents at Mar-a-Lago,” Panetta said in an interview with NPR.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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President Biden is facing a Department of Justice investigation after his lawyers found classified documents at his Delaware residence and an office in Washington, D.C.
“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said Thursday.
The announcement comes three days after news broke that classified documents had been found at Biden’s private office in November less than a week before the midterm elections – a discovery that led the DOJ to launch an initial inquiry.
In response to Garland’s announcement Thursday, the White House said it has “cooperated closely” with the DOJ during its review and plans to continue working with Hur’s special counsel investigation, according to a statement from Richard Sauber, a lawyer for the president.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” according to the statement.
On Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “takes classified information, classified documents very seriously” and that his office will cooperate with the special counsel as it has been doing with the Department of Justice.
Here’s what we know about the Biden documents so far:
On three occasions, classified documents were found at Biden’s private residence and a D.C. office he used before becoming president.
Early last November, Biden’s personal lawyers were packing files from his one-time office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank founded in 2018 by the University of Pennsylvania where Biden served as a fellow and professor before he became president.
There, in a “locked closet,” the White House says, they discovered some files that were marked as classified, even though the office had not been authorized for the storage of classified documents. The documents were quickly turned over to the National Archives.
Then, on Nov. 4, the National Archives inspector general informed the Department of Justice of the discovery. In mid-November, Garland tapped John Lausch, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Chicago, to begin an initial investigation.
In December, after a review that began after the November discovery, Biden’s personal counsel Robert Bauer informed Lausch that another set of documents had been found in the garage of Biden’s private home in Wilmington, Del. Those documents were soon secured by the FBI.
Finally, on Wednesday night, Biden’s team discovered one more classified document at Biden’s Wilmington home.
The White House says it was unintentional and that they will cooperate fully.
Biden has said that he takes the handling of classified information seriously and that he is “cooperating fully and completely” with the Justice Department.
“They found some documents in a box in a locked cabinet, or at least a closet. And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box. And they did what they should have done,” Biden said earlier this week, after the first reports about the documents in the D.C. office.
On Thursday, after reports that more documents were discovered at his Delaware garage, Biden turned defensive when pressed by a reporter. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage. OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street,” he said.
The White House says Biden does not know the content of the documents.
Still, the White House was hardly forthcoming about the existence of a second set of documents. When it confirmed the first discovery in the D.C. office, there was no mention of the second batch recovered in Delaware. It was only after news reports that revealed the later discovery did the White House acknowledge it.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” Sauber said in a statement Thursday.
We don’t know what was in the documents, or how many were found.
The documents are classified, so they have not been publicly described, beyond that they were records that dated to Biden’s time as vice president during the Obama administration.
A special counsel will oversee the investigation.
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to take charge of the DOJ’s investigation, calling the events “extraordinary circumstances.” The investigation will be conducted following the department’s rules, but the special counsel operates independently of day-to-day oversight from the Justice Department — an arrangement designed to avoid even the suggestion of interference.
Robert Hur, the special counsel, is a longtime prosecutor who served, at the appointment of then-President Donald Trump, as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland from 2018 to 2021. He has previously worked on a variety of national security, public corruption and corporate fraud cases.
“This appointment underscores for the public the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said Thursday.
The Hur appointment follows Garland’s decision last November to tap former war crime prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel in a pair of cases involving former President Trump, including his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, criticized the Biden administration over its handling of the classified document situation in a press conference Thursday.
Critics have accused Biden of hypocrisy and say he should have publicized the discovery sooner.
Critics of Biden, including many Republicans, have seized on the revelations to raise new complaints about the Biden administration’s handling of the Trump classified document saga, including the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.
“Another faux pas by the Biden administration by treating law differently based upon your political beliefs. Treats President Trump one way but treats President Biden a whole different way,” said Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a press conference Thursday.
McCarthy and others have also said that Biden should have disclosed the discovery sooner: The first documents were discovered on Nov. 2, just six days before last fall’s midterm elections.
Republicans have already vowed to use their new House majority to probe Biden’s handling of the classified documents and how federal agencies responded.
On Friday, Republican House Judiciary members sent a letter to the attorney general announcing their inquiry into the handling of the documents and the appointment of Hur. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., demanded “all documents and communications” between the DOJ, FBI and White House related to the “mishandling of the classified documents” and the appointment of the special counsel.
And Trump himself has hammered Biden over the documents on his social media site Truth Social. “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” he wrote Monday.
There are parallels with the Trump classified documents saga, but the two situations are not identical.
The Presidential Records Act requires that all presidential (and vice presidential) documents be turned over to the National Archives upon the end of an administration. Other rules govern the storage of classified documents.
Now, both presidents have run afoul of those rules.
But from what we know so far, there are already important differences between how the two have handled their respective situations.
In the case of former President Donald Trump, the National Archives was the first to identify the missing documents and request their return.
Trump initially resisted returning them, and his lawyers at times misled federal investigators. After months of back-and-forth between the government and Trump aides, 15 boxes of documents were returned in January 2022. According to the FBI, the boxes included 184 classified documents, including 25 marked “Top Secret,” as well as others denoted with labels indicating they contained national security information, such as “FISA.” But more documents still remained at Mar-a-Lago, and ultimately the FBI raided the resort in August to retrieve the rest.
By contrast, Biden’s team appears to have found what Sauber described as a “small amount” of documents first, then returned them to the federal government promptly.
Still, the revelations about improperly stored documents and the appointment of a special counsel are an “embarrassment” to the Biden administration, said Leon Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration and as Secretary of Defense under President Obama
“It’s both an embarrassment and damaging to the credibility of the White House, because obviously the president has criticized former president Trump and the way he handled classified documents at Mar-a-Lago,” Panetta said in an interview with NPR.
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