The past week has been a cavalcade of misdirection and non-answers from the Biden administration, as the mainstream media increasingly becomes disenchanted with the White House, most visibly in the form of Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Joe Biden himself.

Jean-Pierre’s ongoing contretemps with the press corps has only grown with the leak of the explosive story on classified documents being found at several locations connected with President Joe Biden, including at the Biden Penn Center and inside the garage of his Delaware home.

Then on Thursday came the news that the Biden DOJ and the White House had agreed to stay quiet about the emergence of those classified documents, in a report by the Washington Post. As my colleague Nick Arama pointed out, a couple major missing puzzle pieces remain about the docs story:

This failure to be straight with the American people prevented Americans from finding out about Joe Biden’s actions before the midterm election.

The White House also hasn’t explained why they had a personal attorney searching through Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center, to begin with. That indicates something else we haven’t been told yet.

WaPo reported that the WH was “blindsided” by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to look into the document scandal: [emphasis mine]

After President Joe Biden’s legal team discovered a cache of classified documents last year at his old office at a Washington, DC, think tank, they immediately contacted the White House counsel’s office, which then notified the National Archives.

Biden’s attorneys were determined to abide strictly by the rulebook to avoid the political firestorm that encircled Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last August.

That’s why many in the White House were blindsided, according to The Washington Post, when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified information.

It was a p.r. move, done in the best interests of Biden and his hangers-on, not the American people, apparently. Recall that Biden personal attorney and Special Counsel, Richard Sauber was the one who found “new” classified documents earlier this week.

Notice, also, the shrill tone of Joe Biden’s replies to media questions over the past day about the documents. He snapped at one reporter, saying it ‘quite frankly bugs’ him” that this is a topic for him to respond to.

With a new story published Friday by the New York Times, though, many of these seemingly separate puzzle pieces are fitting together. And there was a major revelation to be culled from the NY Times’ report, which I only saw thanks to a new piece from my Hot Air colleague John Sexton. He highlights exactly who inside the White House public relations team pushed for this slow roll scheme–and it’s a name many long-time political watchers will recognize:

Today the NY Times published its take on the behind-the-scenes decisions about this potential scandal. The Times points to another top Biden adviser as one of the few people who were in-the-know from the start: Crisis PR specialist Anita Dunn.

Sexton then dropped this excerpt from the piece: [emphasis mine]

The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate…

The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president’s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation.

Now, let’s back up a little and look at what we have here: Richard Sauber, who said he (conveniently) happened to find more documents where they weren’t supposed to be–even after the WH assured us the search for classified documents was complete; Joe Biden’s own sister; another presidential attorney, Bob Bauer; and Bauer’s wife, Anita Dunn.

Sexton reminds us why Dunn’s name will seem like deja vu to some readers:

If you’re not familiar with Dunn, she was the person behind the war on Fox News during the Obama administration. She’s been in and out of the White House since the start of the Biden administration. She helped come up with the phrase “ultra MAGA” …

In other words it was no accident that the White House and Joe Biden aren’t prepared for media questions about this–they never thought they would get caught in this mess, once the Justice Department reviewed any documents. You might say Dunn and the rest of them… chose poorly.