Long before today’s political mayhem, I came across a top secret document on a table in Joe Biden’s White House office.
The red warning on the cover caught my attention but my eyes drifted to the then-vice president’s keepsakes, a leather binder and photos of Jill, Beau, Hunter, Ashley and Champ.
I was there to interview Biden about the financial crisis. He was animated and optimistic. He stood, sat down, leaned in and spread his arms. He talked about Amtrak and blue collar workers (Bully! on both) under the potent gaze of Thomas Jefferson.
This was Asher Brown Durand’s portrait of Jefferson, which Biden hung in his office as vice president. When he became our nation’s 46th president, Biden moved the painting to a prominent spot by the fireplace in the Oval Office.
Rembrandt Peale’s Jefferson portraits are more popular, but Durand’s is uniquely transfixing.
But, I digress.
Minutes after our interview ended, the classified document caused a minor skirmish in the West Wing, which I’ll explain in a moment.
Classified documents are everywhere these days. Donald Trump took boxes and boxes to Mar-a-Lago. Biden left some in Washington’s Penn Biden Center, at his home in Wilmington and in his garage, perhaps the most Biden thing ever.
Special counsels are investigating. Twitter is seething. Trump is pissed. Biden is surprised. Are these cases of espionage or overdue library books?
The answer is important. Trump and Biden are under investigation because the U.S. classifies records about launch codes and spy games and terrorism cells.
The classified document I saw in Biden’s office in 2010 could have been any of those.
A year into his vice presidency, Biden had agreed to a White House interview with The (Wilmington) News Journal, his hometown paper. Biden was in charge of the administration’s rescue plan for assets hollowed out by bad mortgage loans and guys from Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns who would later be played in the movies by Stanley Tucci and James Woods.
This was high drama, so Fred Comegys, a national photographer of the year, got the assignment. He’d been capturing Delaware life with a camera for half a century.
For a good portion of those years, Fred took photos of Biden at the Italian Festival in Wilmington, riding the Acela, clutching Rotarians, embracing Louis Redding, a lawyer friend who helped end school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.
You get the picture.
Fred and his brothers owned a bar in downtown Wilmington called, what else, Comegys Pub. Biden didn’t drink, but this was his kind of place. If you moved Fred’s bar to Scranton, coal miners would throw a party. Fred had the body of a defensive tackle and the head of a pirate, with silver hoop earrings and wild gray hair.
On the morning of the interview, the reporting team wore wool overcoats for the walk from Lafayette Square to a guard station off Pennsylvania Avenue.
It took an hour to clear security. Armed guards rifled through our bags. They inspected Fred’s Nikon D300 and his signature lens, a Tokina fisheye.
For years by this day in history, if Joe spotted Fred (easy to spot) in a crowd, he’d wave him over. Fred was Joe’s Instagram guy before Instagram.
Biden’s director of communications at the time was a little known ex-reporter named Jay Carney. Not even a year after our interview, Obama hired Carney to be his press secretary, sending him out to match wits with the press scrum over the killing of Osama bin Laden, the massacre at Sandy Hook and the war over Obamacare. You’d see Jay every day on CNN and FOX.
But this happened before that.
Carney had done stints with Time and The Miami Herald. He spoke Russian. He liked baseball.
I pegged him as friendly.
Not so on this day in 2010.
Carney’s head listed like a wounded ship as Biden talked about the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He stared at the floor. He stuffed a hand in his pocket. He wanted this to be over. An hour and a half into the interview, he got his wish. Elizabeth Alexander, Biden’s press secretary, wrapped things up.
We were about to oblige Carney when Joe waved Fred over to his desk for just a few more posed photos.
A White House photographer, there for the interview, stepped out and I chitchatted with Carney, Alexander, reporter Nicole Gaudiano and editor David Ledford.
When Joe and Fred finished, Alexander led us to an anteroom and out to a hallway that skirts the Roosevelt Room on its way to the Brady press briefing room.
As we neared the exit, notebooks full of Bidenisms, Carney rushed up. Guys with ear pieces appeared. A Panasonic recorder in my hand clicked on.
Carney had seen the document on the table, and he knew we had seen it too.
On 9/11, Carney was a pool reporter with President George W. Bush. He was in that schoolroom when Bush, reading to children, first learned of the Twin Towers attacks. He was on Air Force One when the president’s plane rerouted to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
He fought to stay with the president but was left behind when Bush next headed to Strategic Air Command in Omaha.
He valued press freedom.
But Fred might have been walking out with photos of classified information. Top secret documents must be handled under strict protocols, stored and viewed only in secure rooms. Someone screwed up.
Carney demanded Fred’s camera.
We said no.
A few tense minutes later, we struck a deal: Fred deleted the offending images. I did not delete the tape but would not publish what I recorded.
And that classified document on Joe’s desk that day?
Could be in Wilmington.
Greg Burton was an editor in Wilmington during Biden’s vice presidency.
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