New details in discovery of classified material President Joe Biden stored
Published Date: 1/14/2023
Source: WRAL
We are learning more about the discovery of classified documents President Joe Biden was storing while he was vice president.
President Joe Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said Monday, prompting the Justice Department to scrutinize the situation to determine how to proceed.
The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them. The documents found in Biden’s former office, which date to his time as vice president, were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2 when they were packing files at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, according to the White House. Officials did not describe precisely how many documents were involved, what kind of information they included or their level of classification.
The White House said in a statement that the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives and Records Administration on the same day the documents were found “in a locked closet” and that the agency retrieved them the next morning.
Biden had periodically used an office at the center from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 presidential campaign, and the lawyers were packing it up in preparations to vacate the space. The discovery was not in response to any prior request from the archives, and there was no indication that Biden or his team resisted efforts to recover any sensitive documents.
Garland has assigned John R. Lausch Jr., the U.S. attorney in Chicago who was appointed by Trump, to look into the matter, according to two people familiar with the decision, confirming a CBS News report. Lausch has been scrutinizing the situation since November, according to one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Two people familiar with the matter said that Lausch has been conducting a so-called initial investigation under a Justice Department regulation that allows an attorney general to appoint a special counsel, a special prosecutor who operates with a measure of day-to-day independence to conduct a particularly sensitive investigation.
Under the regulation, an initial investigation consists of “such factual inquiry or legal research as the attorney general deems appropriate” to “be conducted in order to better inform the decision” about whether a matter warrants the appointment of a special counsel.
The White House statement said that it “is cooperating” with the department but did not explain why Biden’s team waited more than two months to announce the discovery of the documents, which came a week before the midterm congressional elections when the news would have been an explosive last-minute development.
It also came shortly before Garland’s Nov. 18 appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel to take over the criminal investigation into Trump’s failure to return a large number of classified documents that were sent to his Florida residence and club, Mar-a-Lago, when he left office — even after being subpoenaed.
At the time, Garland cited the fact that Trump had just announced he was running for president again, and that Biden had indicated that he is likely to run as well, as justification to transfer control of the investigation to Smith. (An attorney general retains final say over whether anyone is charged with a crime by a special counsel.)
Trump jumped on Monday’s disclosure. “When is the FBI going to raid the many houses of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”
That appeared to refer to Trump’s disputed claim that before leaving office he declassified all the documents the FBI found when it searched Mar-a-Lago in August. No credible evidence has emerged to support that claim, and his lawyers have resisted repeating it in court, where there are professional consequences for lying. In any case, the potential charges the FBI cited in its search warrant affidavit do not depend on whether intentionally mishandled documents were classified.
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