WASHINGTON — A leaked passage from closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee casts Kathy Chung, a former aide to President Biden who helped pack up his vice presidential office, as responsible for not checking to make sure classified documents weren’t taken.

Republicans have expressed concern for months that Democrats would throw Chung under the bus to get Biden out of legal trouble — as special counsel Robert Hur reviews whether the president or anyone in his orbit broke the law.

Chung told the House panel that she had a security clearance at the time, but assumed classified documents weren’t present before dispatching about 13 boxes to the Penn Biden Center, CNN reported Wednesday morning ahead of a memo from committee Democrats that contained the same excerpt.

The partial transcript shows Oversight Committee investigators asking Chung to describe how documents from Biden’s vice presidential office were packaged.

“They were in a file folder first before they went in a box, correct?” a questioner asked Chung.

Chung replied, “Well, the file folder was in the drawer, and we gathered up the file folders and put in a box.”

“And at that time when you took the file folders, there were documents in the file folders?” the questioner followed up.

“Yes,” Chung said.

“Did you go through the file folders and the documents at that point?” the committee representative pressed.

“No,” Chung said.

CNN said that Chung’s remarks “buttress Biden’s story that he was ‘surprised’ about the discovery late last year of classified documents.” However, it’s unclear to what degree Chung was involved in sending classified records to Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del., where sensitive documents from his vice presidency and even his Senate years were found in a garage and various locations inside his residence.

The memo released Wednesday by the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), said “[Chung] and others worked quickly to pack up the office and did not review individual documents” and added Chung “confirmed that no one in the Biden family instructed her on what to pack, including classified documents, or was involved in the packing process.”

Conservative commentators have expressed concern that Chung would become the scapegoat for Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

A House Oversight Committee spokesperson said that “Raskin is playing defense lawyer for President Biden instead of engaging in oversight of this administration.”

Committee Democrats have at other points released information in an attempt to derail committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), including by revealing in March that Comer had subpoenaed the bank records of first son Hunter Biden’s associates as part of an investigation of Biden’s role in his family’s overseas influence peddling.

“Kathy Chung provided valuable information to the Oversight Committee’s investigation of President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Kathy Chung’s testimony undermines the White House’s narrative of events,” a committee spokesperson told The Post.

“We know the classified documents were not kept in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center as the Biden team has asserted and the timeline for packing up these documents starts six months earlier. We are not releasing the full transcript at this time as it contains sensitive information to this ongoing investigation.”

Comer said last month that Chung “provided startling information that undermines the Biden White House’s narrative.”

“Today we learned that when Joe Biden left the vice presidency, boxes containing classified documents, vice presidential records, and other items were stored in three different locations around the Washington, DC area, including an office near the White House, an office in Chinatown, and eventually the Penn Biden Center,” Comer said April 4.

“At some point, the boxes containing classified materials were transported by personal vehicles to an office location. The boxes were not in a ‘locked closet’ at the Penn Biden Center and remained accessible to Penn Biden employees as well as potentially others with access to the office space. We need to find out who had access to these documents.”

Comer said Chung’s testimony also revealed a previously unknown detail in the story: that the White House sought to retrieve documents from the office in May 2022, long before the reported early November discovery of sensitive records.

Biden’s lawyers say they initially found classified documents on Nov. 2 while clearing out his former office at the Penn Biden Center near Capitol Hill.

Some of them reportedly were marked “top secret” and pertained to Iran and Ukraine.

The discovery — just six days before the midterm elections — was kept quiet, even though former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of records was a major election issue following an Aug. 8 FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Additional Biden classified documents were found on Dec. 20 in his Wilmington garage, followed by a series of additional discoveries at the home, including by the FBI, which also searched Biden’s Rehoboth Beach, Del., vacation home and left with written notes.

Special counsel Jack Smith is investigating whether Trump mishandled records after leaving office in 2021.

Smith’s probe, unlike Hur’s into Biden, has been rife with leaks, including the revelation last month that Secret Service agents assigned to protect Trump reportedly would testify to a grand jury.

Biden in September chided Trump as “irresponsible” for retaining classified documents at his Florida compound, which is guarded by Secret Service — unlike Biden’s Wilmington home and DC office following his vice presidency.

The president has sought to downplay the controversy, saying in a Feb. 8 PBS interview, “The best of my knowledge, the kind of things they picked up are things that — from 1974, stray papers.”

Biden first publicly acknowledged the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center at a Jan. 10 press conference in Mexico City — but only after CBS broke the story on Jan. 9.

In his initial remarks, Biden didn’t say that a second cache of classified documents had been found in his Wilmington garage and gave the impression only one set of records was found.

Biden acknowledged on Jan. 12 that some classified records were found next to his classic Corvette in Wilmington, but denied he was reckless with the nation’s secrets.

“My Corvette is in a locked garage, OK?” he said at the time. “So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.”

A week later, on Jan. 19, Biden insisted to reporters during a trip to California that “there is no there there.”

Although the White House said at the time that searches for records were complete, additional documents were found by Biden’s lawyers, while an FBI search found six more items with classification markings.

First son Hunter Biden, who is under federal investigation for possible tax fraud, money laundering, and illegal foreign lobbying, frequently visited the Wilmington home and listed it as his own residence on a 2018 background check form. 

A photo from Hunter’s abandoned laptop showed a beaten-up box of “Important Doc’s” at the Delaware residence, though it’s unclear what records it held.