During a Fox News interview over the weekend, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe slammed Democrat President Joe Biden for his mishandling of numerous sets of classified documents, saying that Biden’s defense of the mishandling being an “inadvertent mistake” is both unlikely and an admission of “gross negligence.”
Ratcliffe made the comments during an appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Sunday, during which he addressed the announcement from White House lawyer Richard Sauber that five additional classified documents had been found during another search of Biden’s private library in his Delaware home.
“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”
Notably, Sauber had previously claimed that the White House was “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.”
“It gets worse every day for President Biden,” Ratcliffe said. “The way it’s going, I would half expect [White House press secretary] Karine Jean-Pierre to change her mantra at the next White House press conference from Joe Biden takes classified documents seriously to Joe Biden takes classified documents.”
“We’ve gone from one set of documents in one location to four different sets of documents in four different locations, and we frankly don’t know where that’s going to end, where we’re going to be at this point next week, and so that makes it really difficult for Joe Biden,” he continued.
“It can’t be an inadvertent mistake when you do it four times. One time, maybe it’s an inadvertent mistake, but … four times?” Ratcliffe said. “Not to mention, of course … his admission that anyone that would do this would be irresponsible. … In legal terms … that’s essentially an admission of gross negligence, which is the legal standard.”
Ratcliffe then addressed how the classified documents contained information about China and Ukraine, and that Hunter Biden would have had access to them.
“So, all of that from a legal standpoint, my concern as the former DNI is the national security standpoint, the fact that classified documents were kept at a house where a drug addict who has colleagues from communist China and unsavory oligarchs from Ukraine would have access to that,” he continued. “What could possibly go wrong? I think, again, it gets worse every day for President Biden with regard to this issue.”
