American presidents face many era-defining challenges: wars, pandemics, recessions. But one that gets less attention seems to keep haunting them: paperwork.
Last November, at Joe Biden’s thinktank in Washington DC, aides to the US president were packing up and they found something that shouldn’t have been there: a stash of classified documents.
As David Smith tells Michael Safi, that was not the end of the matter. A further search of Biden’s property turned up more secret documents that needed to be handed over to the national archives. It’s left Biden with a legal headache, but perhaps more pressing: a political one.
The revelations have been leapt upon by supporters of Donald Trump who wasted no time in calling for Biden to face the same scrutiny as the former president who saw his own home raided by the FBI after ignoring demands to hand over documents he had taken without authorisation.
