The Justice Department of the United States has opened an investigation after lawyers for the president Joe Biden they will meet in november a dozen classified documents that the current president had in a private office that he opened in a Washington think tank after occupying the vice presidency con Barack Obama. Although the exact number of documents or their content has not been made public, CNN sources have assured this Tuesday that they are intelligence memos, national security and with information about Iran, UK and Ukraine.
The case apparently has profound differences with that of former President Donald Trumpwhich is under a criminal investigation for the irregular handling of hundreds of classified and top-secret documents that he took with him when he left the White House and were located by the FBI at his private residence in Mar-a-Lago (Florida). He represents, in any case, at least a image coup for Bidenwho when the scandal of his predecessor broke out accused him of “irresponsible“.
The presence of documents on Ukraine also intensifies the predicament for Biden, whose son Hunter is under the spotlight justice investigation and has become target of accusations of the republicans. They have promised to investigate with their new control in the lower house both the alleged politicization of the Department of Justice as if he son of the president he used his father’s position to both do business in China and Ukraine. Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of the Ukrainian gas company Business when his father was in charge of carrying out the policy towards the country of the Barack Obama Administration.
“Surprised”
At a press conference this Tuesday in Mexico City, where he has participated in meetings with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada, Biden has not answered the question of how these documents got to his private office but has said that they stayed “Surprised to learn that government documents had been taken” there. The president has also assured that You don’t know what’s in that material located and explained that his lawyers “have not suggested that he ask what documents they were”.
“People know that I I take classified information seriously“,” has also declared the president.
Trump Counterattack
The discovery of the Biden documents may also hinder the work of justice in his investigation of Trump, including the possibility that he obstructed the investigation and destroyed documents. And so far he has served both Republican leaders and Trump himself to launch into counterattack. “When is he going FBI to make one raid in the many houses of Joe Biden, perhaps even in the White House?”, he wrote Monday on Truth, his social network.
The former president also wrote that the Biden documents were “definitely not declassified“, delving into his thesis, questioned, that he did not do anything irregular because he had the authority as president to declassify material and he assures, without evidence, that he had done it with everything found in Mar-a-Lago.
From Congress, meanwhile, the Republican who now chairs the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turnerhas written a Letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Hainesurging him to “immediately review and assess the damage” that Biden was able to cause by withholding the classified documents.
The development
Biden’s materials were located on November 2 by personal lawyers for the president when they were packing files housed in a locked cabinet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, a private entity of the president attached to the University of Pennsylvania, where the current president was an honorary professor between 2017 and 2019.
As Richard Sauber, President Biden’s special counsel, explained in a statement on Monday, immediately after the discovery the White House legal office informed the National Archiveswho took possession of the documents the next day and notified the Department of Justice. Sauber also asserted that “since the discovery, the president’s personal lawyers have cooperated with archives and Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden administration documents are in the files’ possession” and noted that the documents “They had not been the subject of any prior request or consultation by the National Archives”.
With these messages, the communiqué underlines the differences with the case of Trumpwhat for months he evaded claims of the Archives and only agreed to deliver some documents under the legal action pressure. Later it was discovered that still had in his possession thousands moreas confirmed after the discovery in August in Mar-a-Lago, where at least 103 classified were found.
Trump-appointed prosecutors
According to various information, Merrick Garland, in charge of Justice, has assigned the case of the Biden papers, in which the FBIa John Lausch, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois what was it Trump-appointed. Another of the prosecutors appointed by the former president, David Weissfrom Delaware, is investigating Hunter Biden.
Those two decisions of Justice to put Republican-appointed prosecutors leading investigations into the Bidens is interpreted as an attempt to underscore the impartiality, that Garland has also sought in the Trump investigation by naming a fiscal especial, Jack Smith.