Obviously, since this is a rather high on the page article, the NY Times is looking to defend Biden, rather than acting like smelling blood in the water sharks (non-paywalled here)
68 Days of Silence: Why the White House Stayed Mum on Classified Documents
The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency.
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.
In fact, the Biden strategy was profoundly influenced by the Trump case, in which the former president refused to turn over all the classified documents he had taken, even after being subpoenaed. The goal for the Biden team, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, was to win the trust of Justice Department investigators and demonstrate that the president and his team were cooperating fully. In other words, they would head off any serious legal repercussions by doing exactly the opposite of what the Biden lawyers had seen the Trump legal team do.
In other words, Biden and his people were looking to run the clock out along with simply hiding the whole issue from the people, while using lawyers with zero national security clearances to search for documents.
In the short term, at least, the bet seems to have backfired. Mr. Biden’s silence while cooperating with investigators did not forestall the appointment of a special counsel, as his aides had hoped, but still resulted in a public uproar once it became clear that the White House had hidden the situation from the public for more than two months. Mr. Biden’s advisers still hope that the trust they believe they have engendered with investigators by not litigating the matter in public may yet pay off in the long run, by convincing the special counsel that nothing nefarious took place.
It’s not about anything nefarious, excepting that Biden’s drug addled son had easy access to the documents in Biden’s house. Oh, and that they were hiding this from the citizens before an election. And that Biden is being treated differently than Trump.
That has proved true. Details about the documents — where they were found, what they are about, where they came from — remain elusive more than 10 days after their existence was first made public by CBS News.
The White House has refused to explain why it took nearly six weeks after the initial discovery of documents to search the president’s home in Wilmington, Del., where a second batch was found on Dec. 20. And it has not said why personal lawyers for the president who do not have security clearances were the ones conducting the searches, but people close to the case said that was done with the approval of the Justice Department.
If only there was some sort of person who would go hardcore on investigating this, using sources to expose what’s going on, rather than writing as press agents, and why the DOJ was working to help hide the issue
(Washington Post) Early on, Biden’s attorneys and Justice Department investigators both thought they had a shared understanding about keeping the matter quiet. But they had very different reasons.
The White House was hoping for a speedy inquiry that would find no intentional mishandling of the documents, planning to disclose the matter only after Justice issued its all-clear. Federal investigators, for their part, typically try to avoid complicating any probe with a media feeding frenzy.
Yeah, they both wanted to hide this from the American public. And the NY Times and Washington Post have both barely covered this, burying most stories deep in the paper.
????BREAKING: Biden speaks on Document Scandal: “I have no regrets. I'm following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It's exactly what we're doing. There's no there, there.”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 19, 2023
Silence was obvious. They had to send FBI for media circus at Mar a lago first to make it all about Trump. Plus, the timing of the mid terms explains everything. It’s what corrupt regimes do. Everything is an information operation with full support of media and heavily voting democrat employees of the federal government and state governments.