The Department of Justice (DOJ) is reviewing a batch of potentially classified documents found in the Washington office space of President Joe Biden’s former institute, the White House said January 9, 2023.
According to Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president “a small number of documents with classified markings” were discovered as Biden’s personal attorneys were clearing out the offices of the Penn Biden Center, where the president kept an office after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign in 2019. The documents were found on November 2, 2022, in a “locked closet”.
Sauber said the attorneys immediately alerted the White House Cunsel’s office, who notified the National Archives and Records Administration — which took custody of the documents the next day.
“Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives”, Sauber said.
A person who is familiar with the matter but not authorized to discuss it publicly said Attorney General Merrick Garland asked US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to review the matter after the Archives referred the issue to the department. Lausch is one of the few US attorneys to be held over from former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Irrespective of the Justice Department review, the revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records could prove to be a political headache for the president, who called Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida “irresponsible”.
Trump weighed in Monday on his social media site, asking, “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?”
The revelation comes as Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives and are promising to launch widespread investigations of Biden’s administration.
It also may complicate the Justice Department’s consideration on whether to bring charges against Trump, who has launched a repeat bid for the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed that the department’s inquiry of his own conduct amounted to “corruption”.
The National Archives did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. Spokespeople for Garland and Lausch declined to comment.
Rep. James Comer, the new GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Monday that the revelation raised questions about the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump probe.
“Is the White House going to be raided tonight? Are they going to raid the Bidens?” he asked reporters. “This is further concern that there’s a two-tier justice system within the DOJ with how they treat Republicans versus Democrats, certainly how they treat the former president versus the current president”.
His Democratic counterpart, Rep. Jamie Raskin, said Biden’s attorneys “appear to have taken immediate and proper action”.
“I have confidence that the Attorney General took the appropriate steps to ensure the careful review of the circumstances surrounding the possession and discovery of these documents and make an impartial decision about any further action that may be needed”, he added.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, said on January 9, 2023 that the American public deserved to know earlier about the revelation of classified documents.
“They knew about this a week before the election, maybe the American people should have known that”, Jordan told reporters. “They certainly knew about the raid on Mar-a-Lago 91 days before this election, but nice if on November 2, the country would have known that there were classified documents at the Biden Center”.
Jordan is among House Republicans pushing for the creation of a “select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal government” within the Judiciary Committee.
Here are some of the comments from people on this issue:
Artur: If the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement is not part of the Biden admin but is the University of Pa, how did the documents get there in the first place ? Because you have to have special clearance to remove such documents, so who sent/took them there, someone had to sign them out. If it was a member of the Biden Admin they need treated the same as Trump.
Jim: Doesn’t matter if they are in office or not, punishment should be given out. If Biden or his team did something wrong, they should be dealt with according to the law. It appears the only difference is that Biden’s team turned in the documents willingly, without being asked, while Trump’s team lied about having them, ignored the DOJ requests and didn’t have the documents safeguarded while in a public place. Seems like there is much more intent on the side of Trump…nonetheless, it will be very surprising if anything happens to either of them.
David: Proud, lifelong Dem here. If Biden did something wrong, he should face the consequences. See how easy that is to say?
Herbert: The documents were found on Nov. 2, 2022. Right before the election yet it never made it into the news cycle. Strange?
Eric: In his defense, those documents were supposed to be stapled to the back of Hunter’s artwork, and headed to Ukraine.
Vanesa: Let me guess how this will shake out. The DOJ will act very concerned and pretend to conduct a thorough investigation to show they are applying equal treatment to Biden as they will with Trump. In the end the DOJ will unsurprisingly opine that the Biden docs were not classified. The DOJ will then resurrect the investigation into the docs at mar-a-largo and use the opportunity to convince us that they are impartial agency. It’s all been scripted in advance and designed to help the case against Trump.
Ron: The issue is that it is illegal to remove those documents from the White House. THAT is breaking the law and both Trump and Biden should be brought up on charges. Trump just muddied the waters by the volume and his not returning them but TAKING them in the first place is the issue.
