President Joe Biden said he was surprised that classified documents were discovered in an office he used before he was elected.
Biden said he doesn’t know what’s in the documents, but that he believed they were handled properly by his lawyers. “We’re cooperating fully,” he said Tuesday at a news conference in Mexico City with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“People know I take classified documents, classified information seriously,” he said. “I was briefed about this discovery, and surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken there to that office.”
Congressional Republicans have promised an investigation of the episode at the Penn Biden Center for Democracy & Global Engagement in Washington, where the president’s lawyers say a small number of classified documents were discovered Nov. 2 in a locked closet. The records were reported to the National Archives the same day, which took possession of them the next morning, according to the White House.
“They did what they should have done: They immediately called the archives — immediately call the archives, turned them over to the archives,” Biden said on Tuesday.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, John Lausch, to review the incident. Biden said he hopes the review “will be finished soon.”
Biden criticized former President Donald Trump as “totally irresponsible” after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, last August and seized about 20 boxes of government documents that included 11 sets of classified materials, according to an unsealed affidavit.
Rep. Mike Turner, the Ohio Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday wrote to the Director of National Intelligence requesting an immediate damage assessment of the Biden records and a briefing for lawmakers on any sensitive secrets that may have been put at risk. The documents included briefing materials on foreign countries from Biden’s time as vice president, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
“Those entrusted with access to classified information have a duty and an obligation to protect it,” Turner said. “This issue demands a full and thorough review.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, wrote the White House counsel’s office and the National Archives on Tuesday requesting information about the Biden documents.
White House officials declined to comment on the congressional probes or on the reported content of the classified materials.
The records found at Biden’s office have created a litany of possible political headaches for the president. In addition to a DOJ review and the promised congressional investigation, Republicans have mocked Biden for criticizing Trump after the FBI search. Biden did not address a question on why the White House waited to confirm the existence of the documents until they were reported by CBS News this week — even though they were discovered six days before the midterm elections.
But the case has also opened Republican lawmakers to accusations of hypocrisy.
Turner defended Trump after the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort. And Comer told CNN in November that Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office “will not be a priority” for his panel.
The GOP’s effort to draw an equivalence between the discovery of the Biden records and the ongoing criminal investigation into the Mar-a-Lago documents also suffers from vast differences in the magnitude of the incidents and the responses by Biden and Trump.
Biden’s attorneys found about 10 classified documents, CBS News reported, while packing up files stored in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank Biden established after his vice presidency. They immediately alerted the National Archives, which took possession of the records the next day, according to Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer.
Trump, by contrast, took hundreds of classified documents from the White House to his Florida home. The National Archives sought their voluntary return for months before the FBI search, when agents found the documents in Trump’s personal office and a storage closet near a pool and deck open to members of the Mar-a-Lago club.
“Our system of classification exists in order to protect our most important national security secrets, and we expect to be briefed on what happened both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden office as part of our constitutional oversight obligations,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said in a statement. “From what we know so far, the latter is about finding documents with markings, and turning them over, which is certainly different from a months-long effort to retain material actively being sought by the government.”
Trump’s associates may have also misled the government about the presence of the documents at his club and how they were handled, and they defied a subpoena requesting the return of the records.
“The most compelling difference, based on what we know, is how individuals responded when they became aware there was classified information,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former senior national security official at the Department of Justice.
Democrats hope the incident at Biden’s office will clarify rather than muddy the political and legal waters surrounding a possible prosecution of Trump by demonstrating the appropriate way to handle such documents.
Trump has claimed that he declassified all of the records found at his home, without providing substantiation.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” Trump said Monday on his Truth Social account.
