Classified documents have been turning up everywhere, even the garage where Joe Biden stashes his vintage Corvette. As Josh Hammer notes, the Delaware Democrat might have a problem.

Unauthorized possession of classified materials is a serious crime for obvious reasons. As vice president, Biden had no authority to declassify, conceal, or leak the classified materials now being discovered. This might be a sign that the deep state is going after their useful idiot, perhaps to make way for a different 2024 candidate.

So far, veterans of the intelligence community are not shouting that the classified documents are only “Russian disinformation.” On the other hand, the sudden discoveries and appointment of a special counsel could be another whitewash.

Special counsel Robert Hur, as Roger Kimball notes, is an “anti-Trump former Robert Mueller apparatchik and swamp monster of the tier-one level.” Nothing to see here folks, so shut up and shelter in place. Revelations pending, it is fully apparent that Joe Biden is a certified Clinton reenactor.

Former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept reams of sensitive data on an unsecured home-brew server. When some 30,000 Clinton emails sparked interest, she bleached the server clean and smashed up phones and other devices. Clinton’s actions violated several statutes but the FBI never conducted a surprise raid in the style of their action against Donald Trump and his associates.

FBI boss James Comey, a longtime Clinton crony, contended that no reasonable prosecutor would pursue the case against Hillary Clinton. To the surprise of nobody, none did. That doubtless encouraged Biden, who may have recalled the experience of Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a Harvard law alum.

Bill and Hillary tapped the former McGovern speechwriter as their top foreign policy adviser and made him deputy national security advisor under Anthony Lake. Berger was unable to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but he did gain fame on the home front.

As a representative to the 9/11 Commission, Berger had special access to Clinton’s record on terrorism. In 2004, several months before his testimony, Berger entered the National Archives, stuffed documents into his pants and socks, like a teenage punk ripping off the latest issue of Penthouse. The intrepid Berger stashed the material on a construction site then returned to retrieve it. This was a serious crime but Berger cut a deal with the Justice Department to stay out of jail, pay a $50,000 fine, and avoid a full explanation of what he had ripped off.

As The Rule of Law in America author Ronald A. Cass noted in 2007, the D.C. Bar Association began to probe what Berger had stolen and why he stole it. Also at stake was the security of the nation and the vitality of the rule of law. Even so, the Justice Department failed to pursue the case and there was no word of any raids or sudden actions by the FBI.

Joe Biden had reason to believe he could shoplift classified wares and get away with it. That recalls lifelong Democrat Alger Hiss, a secret Communist who sent classified information to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Whittaker Chambers (Witness), who had been part of the Stalinist spy ring, kept microfilm of State Department documents with Hiss’ handwriting in a hollowed out pumpkin on his property.

The “pumpkin papers” contained 65 pages of secret State Department documents that had been retyped, four pages in Hiss’ own handwriting of copied State Department cables, and five rolls of 35mm film containing photos of State Department and U.S. Navy documents. This became key evidence in the famous trial in 1950. Hiss was convicted of perjury and served 44 months in federal prison. (For a full account see Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein.

Hiss was also the darling of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who promoted the American for key positions at the United Nations. At the founding U.N. conference in San Francisco, Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo ghost wrote the speech of U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. (See Trumbo, by Bruce Cook.)

According to the FBI, the Hiss case “helped further confirm the increasing penetration of the U.S. government by the Soviets during the Cold War.” The American Left downplays or denies that reality, and belief in Hiss’ innocence remains a loyalty test on the Left. Hiss died in 1996 at the age of 92. As his example signifies, it is possible to rip off classified documents, spy for Communist regimes, become a hero to the Left, and get off light.

Sandy Berger and Hillary Clinton got off with nothing, and now the spotlight turns on Joe Biden, who stashed classified documents all over the place. Call them the “garage papers,” and the people have a right to know what those documents show about Biden’s foreign connections, especially with China.

“Biden Gets China,” headlined the far-left Atlantic in early 2012. The move was orchestrated by national security advisor Thomas Donilon. In a 2013 speech, Donilon disagreed “with the premise put forward by some historians and theorists that a rising power and an established power are somehow destined for conflict.” As Donilon saw it, “a deeper U.S.-China military-to-military dialogue is central to addressing many of the sources of insecurity and potential competition between us” (emphasis added).

“The shift to a strategy of engagement with Biden at the top, orchestrated by Donilon,” the Atlantic explained, “allows the U.S. to deal with China’s likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status—and to continue both the Departments of State’s and Treasury’s ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese leaders” (emphasis added). As the Church Lady said, “Well isn’t that special.”

A “Vice President/Next President” status is hard to find in the U.S. Constitution. In this special “status,” the vice president serves an intern for a guaranteed job in waiting, the presidency of the United States. There were plenty of contenders among Democrats for 2020, but Joe got the job, even though the addled plagiarist never quite campaigned. So it looks like China “got Biden.”

The Delaware Democrat is on record that the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks,” and not even competition for the United States. For Joe Biden the greatest threat comes from Americans who want the United States to be great, the kind of people who value their constitutional rights and freedoms.

As these folks may have noticed, Joe Biden has yet to deliver a speech, backlit in red, with U.S. Marines in the background, warning China to stay away from Taiwan, to stop the crackdown on Hong Kong, to free forced labor, or free Tibet, which the Communist regime has occupied since the 1950s.

As these and other events confirm, the Chinese Communist Party folks are as bad as they come, and they are happy with Joe “Big Guy” Biden in the White House. If anybody thought that surpasses anything the Soviet Union was able to achieve, it would be hard to blame them.

As they probe the garage papers, investigators should also take a look at Biden’s own Senate papers, housed at the University of Delaware. Biden claimed the papers would lead to deeper understanding and university officials said the materials would illuminate decades of U.S. policy and diplomacy and the vice president’s critical role in its development.

Biden’s Senate records were supposed to be available to the public two years after Biden’s last day in elected office. That changed in April 2019, when the plagiarist once again threw his hat in the ring for president. The university quickly changed the release to the end of 2019 or two years after Biden retired from public life.

Biden claimed the materials could be “taken out of context” or used as “fodder” against him in his run for president. The documents remained inaccessible, even in the face of FOIA requests.

From Alger Hiss and Sandy Berger to Hillary Clinton and Delaware Democrat Joe Biden, it’s all about memory against forgetting. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.