It is a “small number of documents classified as confidential”. They were found in a “locked closet” at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank that Joe Biden sometimes used as a workplace, the US President’s legal adviser, Richard Sauber, said on Monday January 9.
However, at this stage, we do not know the route of these classified documents dating from the vice-presidency of Joe Biden – under Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2017, nor the degree of classification, nor the content. It was Joe Biden’s lawyers who discovered these documents on November 2, 2022 by emptying these premises and handing them over to the Archives, responsible for preserving this type of act, said Richard Sauber in a press release.
“The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice,” said Richard Sauber. “The documents had not been the subject of any prior request or request” and, since their delivery to the Archives, Joe Biden’s lawyers have continued to cooperate in order “to ensure that the Archives are in their possession from any Obama-Biden administration archive,” he added. As CNN reports, Federal officials are required by law to relinquish official records and classified documents when their government service ends.
An investigation opened by the FBI
According to the American media CBS News, who revealed the affair, Justice Minister Merrick Garland ordered the Chicago federal prosecutor to review the documents, and the federal police (FBI) also opened an investigation. Citing an anonymous source, CBS News indicates that a dozen documents are concerned and none contain nuclear secrets.
As specified the washington postJoe Biden opened the Penn Biden Center in February 2018 as a think tank for the University of Pennsylvania in Washington, attracting some of the nation’s top foreign policy experts and lawmakers.
The center’s leadership included many of Joe Biden’s longtime aides, many of whom now hold top positions in the president’s administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was thus the center’s managing director and Steve Ricchetti, senior adviser to the president, was managing director after Joe Blinken.
“Why were these documents discovered six years later?”
The Republicans immediately seized on this affair. “Why were these documents discovered six years later?” Asked CNN Byron Donalds, elected to the House of Representatives. “President Biden was very critical of President Trump who mistakenly took classified documents to his residence or elsewhere and now it looks like he may have done the same,” James Comer told him, Representative from Kentucky. “How ironic.”
The discovery of the documents comes as Special Counsel Jack Smith investigates former President Donald Trump for potentially mishandling classified records at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The FBI had carried out a spectacular search of Donald Trump’s residence in August 2022 in order to recover thousands of documents, including at least 325 classified, taken by the ex-president after his departure from the White House and which he had until then refused to return to the Archives. According to press reports, these confidential documents seized at his Mar-a-Lago club contained in particular sensitive information on China and Iran, as well as nuclear secrets.
“Classified national security information has gone where it shouldn’t have”
“When will the FBI search Joe Biden’s many residences, or even the White House?” Donald Trump reacted in a press release. “These documents were certainly not declassified”, continued the one who notably wrongly argued, after the documents were seized at his home, that the President of the United States “can declassify (a document) just by saying that it is declassified, even just by thinking it”.
According to a source familiar with the matter interviewed by the washington post, the circumstances seem to be quite different between the two cases. Unlike Donald Trump, who had demonstrated an obstruction in order to prevent the communication of certain documents, those concerning Joe Biden were voluntarily notified. In addition, the number of classified documents concerned is much lower than those of Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, according to this source, “at the heart of the problem, in both situations, classified national security information went where it should not have, which raises a larger question about the treatment of [matériels] classified, both in the White House and then during the transition period”.