Come On, CNN

By Dominic Pino

Friday, January 13, 2023

 

Kevin Liptak, Phil Mattingly, Jeff Zeleny, and Arlette Saenz — yes, four reporters on the byline, plus two others listed as contributing to the report — have written a remarkable piece about the concluding days of Joe Biden’s vice presidency. It begins:

 

The early days of 2017 were a whirlwind for Vice President Joe Biden: swearing in a new Congress, a surprise Medal of Freedom, a speech at Davos and one final trip to Ukraine.

 

Partly to wrap up his policy portfolios, partly to tout his accomplishments, and partly to occupy himself following the death of his son a year earlier, Biden thrust himself into work in a final sprint to mark what then appeared to be the end of a four-decade run at the highest levels of government.

 

As Biden was busy keeping busy, however, his office was shutting down. Aides scrambled to pack up his workspaces in the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and at his official residence, the Naval Observatory.

 

Those competing objectives – to use his office until the final minutes even as it was obliged to shut down – made for a muddled and hurried process that left aides packing boxes of documents and papers late into the night, even as more material kept arriving.

 

Even for CNN, this is a bit much. Biden’s aides may have misplaced a few classified documents, but this hard-hitting team of reporters is here to inform us that the error may have been because they were working too hard for The People. How would the republic have lived without Biden’s awards and speeches? And he even had to swear in a new Congress — who could have seen that task coming?

 

In a classic example of contemporary “journalism,” the story is full of anonymous quotes and paraphrases. Examples:

 

“That made the process very disjointed – not because people weren’t capable, but because it wasn’t some straight line out of the White House,” a source with direct knowledge of the process said. . . .

 

“It was just a really really weird time for everyone,” the source familiar said. . . .

 

“Documents and briefings are always coming in and it didn’t slow down, even when the boxes were being packed,” another person familiar with the process said. . . .

 

“We had clear Presidential Records Act guidelines – everyone did – in terms of how to close things down,” one of the people familiar with the matter said. “The people who actually needed to pay attention to them definitely did. For most of us it wasn’t some all-consuming thing, but obviously for those responsible for the vice president’s stuff, it was a big deal and they treated it as such.”

 

Everyone was competent and professional and committed to the highest standards of public service — but it was just such a weird time, you see. Work, work, work:

 

The morning after receiving the Medal of Freedom, Biden traveled to New York to appear on ABC’s “The View,” joining Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar at the talk show table as yet another stop in his victory lap of public service.

 

And if anything went wrong, the anonymous sources want you to know it was the junior staffers’ fault:

 

Among the aides working in Biden’s office at the time were his chief of staff Steve Ricchetti, senior adviser Mike Donilon and communications director Kate Bedingfield, who now all hold senior roles in Biden’s White House. But according to people familiar with the matter, it was lower-level staffers who carried out most of the actual packing of Biden’s belongings and documents, including his executive assistant Kathy Chung, who now works at the Pentagon, as well as other personal aides.

 

Incredible stuff.