House GOP demands probe of Biden files after defending Trump
HOUSE Republicans seized on the discovery of classified documents at a private office used by President Joe Biden, demanding multiple probes of the incident even after defending Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of hundreds of sensitive records.
Representative 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.
“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, said Tuesday his committee also planned to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
But Turner defended Trump after FBI agents searched his Mar-a-lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, in August and seized dozens of classified documents the former president hadn’t voluntarily turned over to the National Archives. 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.
Nonetheless, 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 calling Trump “totally irresponsible” after the FBI search. The president faces questions about the nature of the documents found at his office, how they wound up there and why the White House waited until Monday to disclose their Nov. 2 discovery—six days before midterm elections.
“My question is the same for the National Archives for Biden as it was for Trump—exactly what kinds of documents are we talking about here and will Joe Biden’s personal residence be raided like Mar-a-lago was raided,” Comer said.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said that “I think everybody sees the double-standard there.”
Difference in magnitude
HOWEVER, the GOP’S effort to draw equivalence between the discovery of the Biden records and the ongoing criminal investigation into the Mar-a-lago documents 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 Biden Penn Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement, 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 W hite 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,” Senator 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.
“I think 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.
DOJ review
ATTORNEY General Merrick Garland directed John Lausch, the Trump-appointed US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to review Biden’s handling of the classified materials found at his office, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Lausch’s inquiry—and Republican efforts on Capitol Hill—are expected to examine the content of the classified documents, how they were removed from the White House and how they were stored.
But former prosecutors say that Trump’s legal jeopardy arises more from possible efforts by his team to obfuscate his possession of classified documents after the government asked for them back. Sauber, the White House lawyer, said that the archives never requested the documents found in Biden’s office.
“There appear to be some differences from the situation with the classified Mar-a-lago documents— most notably, with these classified documents, the voluntary notification to NARA the same day they were located and retrieval by NARA the next day,” said Kathleen Kedian, who previously held senior roles in the counterintelligence and export control section of the Department of Justice and is a lecturer at George Washington University Law School.
“But investigators should and will still be looking at how the documents got there, who handled them, how long they were there, and what threat they pose to national security,” Kedian added.
Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and professor of law at Columbia University, said “whether criminal charges are contemplated has historically been much more about how the official deals with the discovery of materials.”
‘Bookkeeping issue’
THOUGH he’s now seeking to probe Biden’s handling of the newly revealed files, Turner told Fox News in August that Trump’s handling of classified documents more closely amounted to “a bookkeeping issue than a national security threat.”
But Republicans have also questioned the timing of the White House revelation. voters went to the polls on Nov. 8 to elect all 435 members of the House and about a third of the Senate ignorant of the discovery of the Biden documents, six days earlier. Democrats performed better than expected, gaining a seat in the Senate and limiting the GOP to a narrow majority in the House.