Republicans ask why Biden classified documents not revealed until after election
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On Tuesday, Republicans demanded to know why the fact that President Joe Biden had classified documents from when he was vice president in his think tank was not revealed until after the midterm elections, with one calling it a “cover-up.”
“When you cover something up before an election,” Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning, “that’s probably a point that needs to be made.”
He said the fact that the White House didn’t say “a damn thing until after the election seems political to me.”
Republican Rep. Don Bacon (left) called it a “cover up,” while Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (right) said, “Maybe the American people should have known.”
House Republicans Demand Justice Department Treat Joe Biden Like It Treats Donald Trump
The White House announced late Monday that Biden’s lawyers discovered 10 classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank on Nov. 2.
That was six days before the midterm elections, in which Republicans won control of the House, but not by the landslide many had predicted.
The delay in announcing the discovery has sparked fury among the Republican Party, with many warning that they expect the Justice Department to treat Biden the way the agency is treating its investigation of former President Donald Trump and the documents he had at Mar-a-Lago.
Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who will become the House oversight chairman, said he plans to send a letter to the National Archives on Tuesday demanding answers.
Comer said he had questions about why the two presidents were being treated differently.
“I wonder if the FBI will raid Joe Biden’s personal residence,” he said Tuesday.
He said he was asking the National Archives about documents in the possession of both former presidents.
“But we’re just trying to figure out exactly what happened at both Mar-a-Lago and Biden.”
And Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, the incoming House Judiciary chairman, did not say whether he would investigate the matter.
He said Tuesday that his committee focused on ‘what whistleblowers say – talking to us about just the political nature of the Department of Justice.
He noted that the range could end up being ‘long-range’.
And he said that Trump was the victim of double standards.
“I think everyone sees the double standards there, you know, plus, plus, the country found out about what happened 91 days before the election with President Trump,” he said. ‘This happened a week before the elections. We didn’t know before.
Meanwhile, Democrats were careful in their response.
“It’s a concern any time classified documents are somewhere they shouldn’t be. But we don’t see evidence of willful intent or obstruction of justice, as we see in the case of Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, who was on many of the panels that investigated Trump.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is looking into the matter and deciding whether to appoint special counsel, such as the one investigating Trump’s hoarding of confidential documents.
Garland has asked the federal prosecutor in Chicago to review the 10 files discovered by Biden’s personal lawyers at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
Trump was among many Republicans demanding answers, and on Tuesday, he said it was time Biden had special counsel, too.
The former president said Monday that his own home was raided by the FBI for having classified documents stored there.
‘When is the FBI going to raid Joe Biden’s many homes, maybe even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,’ he wrote on social media.
Special counsel would give the White House some kind of political cover, allowing officials to deny Republican requests for an investigation by saying the Justice Department is investigating.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy expressed his disbelief at the timing of the discovery Monday night.
‘Really? Did you just find them now? After all these years?’ she told reporters on Capitol Hill.
‘President Trump had never been in office before and had just left, he left. here is an individual [who] he spent his last 40 years in office and still had this vice president thing.’
“It just shows that they were trying to be political with President Trump,” he added.
Biden was in Mexico City on Monday for a meeting with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and declined to answer questions about how the documents ended up inside the offices.
As the press in Mexico City filed out of the meeting room, a reporter yelled: ‘Mr. President, any response to the discovery of classified documents?’
The president did not respond.
Joe Biden looks at his briefing files Monday in Mexico City as a reporter yells out a question about classified documents found in the Washington DC offices of his think tank. Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, looks up as the press team exit
The classified materials included some top-secret files with the designation “Sensitive Compartment Information,” also known as SCI, which is used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.
The White House special counsel said in a statement Monday: “The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden administrative records, including a small number of documents with classified marks”. .’
It’s unclear what the classified documents contain, but their discovery follows the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last year and comes as Republicans begin their investigations into the Biden family.