Joe Biden on Thursday (January 19th) played down the outcry over the discovery of confidential documents from his vice-presidential days in a think tank and in his family home, saying it was ” the wind “.
“Listen, we found some documents (…) which were stored in the wrong place, we immediately handed them over to the Archives and the Ministry of Justice”said the American president during a trip to California to journalists who questioned him on this subject.
“I think you’ll see it’s windy. I have no regrets. I do what the lawyers told me they wanted me to do. That’s exactly what we do.”he continued, adding that he was cooperating ” entirely “ with justice. This is a tricky business for Joe Biden, who plans to run in 2024, and for Democrats as a whole.
The entire boxes of Donald Trump
The latter did not hesitate to criticize former Republican President Donald Trump, targeted by a judicial inquiry for having kept whole boxes of documents when he left Washington in 2021.
As for the Democratic president, the first classified documents were discovered on November 2 at the Penn Biden Center, a Washington think tank where Joe Biden once had an office, and reported to the National Archives.
In December, the president’s lawyers then found, in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, “a small number of documents” potentially confidential, and notified the Ministry of Justice.
Suspicions of “double weights, two measures”
And in January, these lawyers unearthed a confidential document, this time in the room adjacent to the garage of the house. The next day, the lawyer for the presidency discovered five more pages there.
To silence the suspicions of ” Two weights, two measures “the Department of Justice has entrusted the investigations of Joe Biden’s files to an independent special prosecutor, as it did for Donald Trump.
Parliamentary inquiry in the House of Representatives
The Republican opposition, for its part, denounced the executive’s drip communication. Taking advantage of her slight majority in the House of Representatives, she launched a parliamentary inquiry and demanded more information.
A 1978 law obliges the presidents and vice-presidents of the United States to transmit, at the end of their mandate, all their e-mails, letters and other working documents to the National Archives.