WASHINGTON — Soon after President Biden found that he had improperly retained classified documents, he turned to the team that had seen him through multiple political and legal crises over the last few years: Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer.
On Nov. 2, a lawyer found a small cache of documents while clearing out a closet at Mr. Biden’s think tank in Washington. One of his first calls was to Mr. Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, a white-bearded election lawyer known for straddling the line between politics and the law.
Over the next few hours, Mr. Bauer helped mobilize a small response team that included Richard Sauber, a top lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office, and several of Mr. Biden’s closest confidants. To no one’s surprise, Ms. Dunn, the president’s most senior communications adviser — and Mr. Bauer’s wife for the last 30 years — was called in by day’s end, according to interviews with two dozen people in their orbit. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House strategy.
Both Ms. Dunn and Mr. Bauer have established themselves over the past decade as two of Mr. Biden’s most leaned-upon advisers. Mr. Bauer has handled many of the Biden family’s most sensitive legal issues, and Ms. Dunn played a critical part in reviving Mr. Biden’s faltering 2020 campaign and stabilizing his West Wing political and communications operations.
To their allies, the two are loyal and steely under fire. To their critics, the couple — and Ms. Dunn in particular — are the embodiment of Mr. Biden’s affinity for revolving-door Washington operatives who move back and forth between high-powered political jobs and lucrative corporate clients.
But Mr. Biden has entrusted them with central roles in the documents matter because he sees in them the strengths that he most prizes in himself: experience, toughness and resilience.
“They are one of D.C.’s pre-eminent couples, and the two of them hugely delivered for Biden,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar and was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of President Donald J. Trump. “Those accomplishments are the bookends of Biden making it to the White House, and proof of the couple’s skills.”
They also reflect Mr. Biden’s mixed views on transparency. In the hours after the documents were discovered, the group had settled on a two-track strategy of strict compliance with the National Archives and the Justice Department, while resisting calls for greater disclosure that left the Biden team scrambling to manage an awkward drip-drip of revelations in the news media, according to people involved in the decisions.
The idea of going public with the discovery never seems to have been seriously considered. Mr. Sauber, with the input of Ms. Dunn, quickly drafted a statement announcing that classified material had been found at the Penn Biden Center — but agreed that it would be made public only if someone else, like archives officials, disclosed it first, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Biden and his team “have been entirely transparent with the Department of Justice in the course of this investigation, while briefing the press consistent with that commitment.”
Understand the Biden Documents Case
The discovery of classified documents from President Biden’s time as vice president has prompted a Justice Department investigation.
- Hasty Packing: The account of how classified files ended up in President Biden’s personal office in Washington is now at the heart of a special counsel’s inquiry into whether the papers were mishandled by two aides.
- Biden’s Miscalculations: How has Mr. Biden handled the document discoveries, and why was the public in the dark for so long? Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The Times, explains the ordeal.
- Implications for Trump Case: Despite the differences between them, the cases involving the president and his predecessor are similar enough that investigators may have a harder time prosecuting Mr. Trump criminally.
- Democrats’ Reaction: Mr. Biden is facing blowback from some members of his own party, as his allies express growing concern that the case could get in the way of the Democrats’ momentum coming out of the midterms.
Ms. Dunn, 65, did not comment for this article. Molly Levinson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bauer, 70, also declined to comment.
The couple’s many allies in Washington describe them as focused on delivering maximum political and legal advantage to their clients, Mr. Biden included.
If Mr. Biden’s inner circle is small, Ms. Dunn’s network in Democratic politics is sprawling, built over four decades. She helped found SKDK, one of the largest public affairs outfits in Democratic politics, and has mentored a long roster of influential operatives: At least 10 SKDK alumni work in the Biden administration, most of them in communications roles.
Ms. Dunn spent the first six months of Mr. Biden’s administration as a “special government employee,” a designation that exempts her from public financial disclosures required of full-time government staff members, before returning to SKDK. At the request of Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff at the time, she returned to the White House full time in the spring of 2022. In August, she divested from her company and an investment portfolio with Mr. Bauer worth $16.8 million to $48.2 million, according to estimates.
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Mr. Bauer is a law professor at New York University who counts two American presidents — Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama — among his clients. After Mr. Biden won the 2020 election, Mr. Bauer held regular briefings in an effort to dismantle Mr. Trump’s false assertions of widespread voter fraud, which he sees an extension of his yearslong work on voter protection issues. (He has also been a longtime champion of greater transparency in government and has taught a class on the subject.)
A New Yorker, Mr. Bauer graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1976. In 1980, he founded the political division of the influential law firm Perkins Coie, where he worked on and off — with breaks to serve as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel — until 2018. (One of his competitors for Democratic clients was William C. Oldaker, who employed a young Hunter Biden at his firm in the early 2000s.)
Mr. Bauer and Ms. Dunn first crossed paths in 1984, when she consulted him on an election recount for a congressional campaign. They did not become close until several years later, when they were both working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. She was the communications director, and he was counsel.
They married in 1993 and had a son; Mr. Bauer has three children from a previous marriage. The couple lives in Maryland with two cats, Oscar and Scoop. They privately joke that they have tried for years to get out of politics. It has not worked out that way.
Ms. Dunn and Mr. Bauer have an informal policy of never working for opposing candidates, and they have always pushed back on the idea that they are a team, friends say. Despite their tendency to travel from candidate to candidate together, allies insist that they are not quite a package deal.
And their tag-team style, while not exactly oppositional, is geared to define the legal and political parameters of a problem — often demonstrated through a disagreement.
They are married, but “you honestly wouldn’t know it in meetings,” where they are comfortable disagreeing with each other, said David Plouffe, who worked with both of them in the Obama White House.
Of Mr. Bauer, he said: “There’s a belief that he is by the book, but he’s also a problem solver, right? He doesn’t like to get close to lines, much less color outside of them, but he’s also very creative within the confines of the line.”
Once, earlier in their careers, Mr. Bauer criticized a communications plan his wife had just pitched for a Democratic Senate candidate so pointedly that a person in the room was stunned to later learn they were married. Ms. Dunn is known for the mantra “I want to push back,” when countering an opinion from her husband she considers to be wrong, friends say.
They share one particular expertise: acting in mock debates. Former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who worked with Ms. Dunn and Mr. Bauer in the 1990s and early 2000s, says the two are precise and unforgiving opponents in critical prep sessions. Ms. Dunn served as a stand-in for Mr. Bradley’s Republican opponent in 1990, Christine Todd Whitman, and Mr. Bauer perfected an uncanny Al Gore impersonation during Mr. Bradley’s unsuccessful 2000 presidential bid.
“They demolished me,” Mr. Bradley recalled in an interview.
Like many presidents, Mr. Biden has always relied on a relatively small corps of advisers, some of whom have been by his side since the 1970s. But his bond with Ms. Dunn and Mr. Bauer was cemented just seven years ago, at a precarious moment in Mr. Biden’s career.
Ms. Dunn and Mr. Bauer began meeting with Mr. Biden in 2015 — and his two closest vice-presidential advisers, Steven J. Ricchetti and Mike Donilon — as he was working through whether he should run for president.
Mr. Obama and his senior staff, led by the White House political director David Simas, had already decided that Hillary Clinton represented the best chance of extending his agenda and that she was owed support for endorsing him after the bruising 2008 primary, although they publicly professed their neutrality.
That stung Mr. Biden, who felt he deserved better, and he spent months mulling his own run before opting out. Mr. Ricchetti, Mr. Donilon, Ms. Dunn and Mr. Bauer — all of whom worked in the Obama White House — stuck with Mr. Biden throughout the process, and shared a belief that he deserved support for faithfully serving Mr. Obama. Mr. Biden has returned the favor by bringing them to the center of his complicated political world.
That same small team, with the addition of several lawyers, is essentially the same group that created the strategy in early November.
Only Mr. Ricchetti, who founded the Penn Biden Center and oversaw the logistics of Mr. Biden’s post-vice-presidential life, seems to be playing a smaller role now.
Mr. Ricchetti, according to several people familiar with the situation, has made it known to friends that he would have publicly placed responsibility on low-level staff members who packed up Mr. Biden’s papers in January 2017 as he left office. (Mr. Ricchetti disputed that account through a White House spokesman.)
But the White House, following Mr. Bauer’s playbook, has chosen to downplay the need for public disclosure. Instead, the emphasis has been on the differences between Mr. Biden’s compliance with requests to return mishandled files and Mr. Trump’s defiance in his own classified records case, which resulted in a search warrant being executed at his Florida residence in August.
The White House believes that strategy is working. Recent polling shows that a majority of Americans believe Mr. Biden is handling the situation appropriately.
The goal, one Biden adviser explained, is to sacrifice a dozen bad news cycles for one big win — the day when Mr. Biden’s team expects the special counsel appointed to investigate the matter to clear those involved of any wrongdoing.
