The case of the classified papers that the US president, Joe Biden, kept irregularly at his home and in his office when he was vice president continues to get complicated, after the White House confirmed this Saturday the discovery of more documents.
For the third time in a week, the White House today had to explain a case that could complicate the last two years of President Biden’s term before the next 2024 presidential election, to which it has not yet confirmed whether it will run.
Through a statement, the White House reported that on Thursday new documents were found in one of the mansions he has in Delaware (USA), classified papers from the time he was vice president (2009-2017) of Barack Obama.
Specifically, there are five additional pages with classification marks that were found Thursday by a White House attorney, Richard Sauber, who searched the Wilmington residence after personal attorneys on Wednesday found a document in a room adjacent to the garage.
Since they did not have the authorization to continue the search, they stopped searching the property and Sauber, a White House attorney with authorization, came the next day and found the documents in a new search.
In the search he was accompanied by officials from the Department of Justice, who “immediately took possession of them,” reports the White House about this investigation process that began in November, after several documents were found in a house of the president and in his office of the think tank Penn Biden Center.
The news comes two days after the United States Attorney General, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special prosecutor who will study all the classified papers that are being found, the conservative lawyer Robert Hur.
The US attorney general made the announcement after the White House and Biden himself confirmed the discovery of new documents on Thursday.
In a press conference, the president briefly referred to the case and assured that the incident will be resolved: “Everything will be cleared up, I’m sure,” he pointed out an event that is reminiscent, although with many differences, of the classified papers found at former President Donald Trump’s mansion.
Trump (2017-2021) is being investigated by the Department of Justice for accumulating classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago (Florida), which were discovered after an FBI raid.
Neither Trump nor Biden should have had in their possession classified documents from their respective Administrations since the law requires that all presidential records be turned over to the National Archives, but the possession of these documents in itself is not a crime, if it is not shows that they were knowingly concealed.
In Biden’s case, it was his own lawyers who notified the authorities that they had found classified documents.
But in the case of Trump, they were discovered after the raid, motivated by a request from the National Archives (in charge of safeguarding all presidential documents) since they had been trying to recover records that the former president had taken to his personal residence for more than a year.
Despite the differences, the Republicans have tried to equate both situations and will undoubtedly try to take political advantage of the crisis that this event will entail for the 80-year-old Biden government.
“How many more classified documents will you find in Joe Biden’s house?” Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee said in a message on social media today.
All this one day after they sent a letter to Garland to announce that they will supervise the investigations of the special prosecutor Hur and those made so far.
“We are monitoring the Justice Department’s actions regarding former Vice President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, including the apparent unauthorized possession of classified material in a private Washington, DC office and in the garage of his Wilmington residence,” notes the letter signed by the chairman of this committee, Jim Jordan, congressman from Ohio.
In the letter they demand that Garland turn over a series of documents related to the Biden investigation by January 27 and highlight the fact that the documents were discovered just before the election.
And it is that, although the case has not been known until this week, it was on November 4, four days before the mid-term elections, when the office of the inspector general of the National Archives contacted the Department of Justice and informed it that the White House had found classified documents.
This story was originally published on January 11, 2023 7:04 p.m.
Source: El Nuevo Herald
