Washington:
US President Joe Biden said he is “fully cooperating” after the White House said on Thursday that “a small number” of classified documents had been found in his private residence, prompting calls for a congressional investigation into alleged mishandling of official papers.
The potentially embarrassing discovery for Biden came as authorities are investigating a much larger scandal involving his predecessor Donald Trump.
The documents dating back to the Obama-Biden administration were found at Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware, after other similar papers were found at a Washington think tank where Biden used to have an office.
Former President Trump hoarded huge numbers of documents in his Florida residence after leaving the White House in 2021, with the FBI taking some 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant in August.
Trump may face obstruction of charges.
But the discovery of papers in the Biden house is politically awkward for a president who touts his high ethical standards, and could also complicate the Trump investigation.
“People know I take classified documents and classified materials seriously,” Biden told reporters Thursday.
“We are fully (and) fully cooperating with the Justice Department’s review. As part of that process, my attorneys reviewed other places where documents from my time as Vice President were stored, and they completed the review last night.
“They discovered a small number of documents with secret markings in storage areas and filing cabinets in my home and my personal library.
“The Justice Department was immediately notified… So we’re going to see all this happen,” he added, refusing to answer screamed questions from the press.
– Stray documents –
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy demanded that “Congress should look into this,” pointing to the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump.
“When is the FBI going to raid Joe Biden’s many homes, maybe even the White House,” Trump had previously written on his social media site Truth Social.
Biden’s team has said that if mistakes were made with his official paperwork, the administration acted immediately to correct any mistakes.
After the first set of documents were discovered last November in Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center think tank, attorneys turned them over to the National Archives, which handles all of this material, the White House counsel’s office said.
Biden’s lawyers then searched possible locations for other stray documents.
In an effort to defuse allegations of political interference, Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a Chicago federal prosecutor appointed during the Trump administration to review the lost Biden documents.
That response differs greatly from Trump, who failed to cooperate with authorities’ repeated efforts to track down missing documents, leading to the FBI entering his home with a search warrant.
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