Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Just like his controversial predecessor Donald Trump, US President Joe Biden has also been caught keeping ‘classified documents’ at his private residence and may face a high-level Congressional inquiry.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social recently.
And, newly-minted Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy demanded that “Congress has to investigate this,” pointing to the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump.
President Biden said he is “cooperating fully” in the investigation after the White House said on Thursday that “a small number” of classified documents had been found at his private residence.
This confession prompted calls for a Congressional investigation into the alleged mishandling of official papers, the media reported on Friday.
The potentially embarrassing discovery for Biden came as authorities investigate a far bigger scandal involving his predecessor Donald Trump.
The documents dating to the pre-Trump era’s 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 vast numbers of documents at his Florida residence, but that was discovered after he left the White House in 2021. The FBI carted away some 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant in August 2022, the reports said. Now, Trump could face obstruction of justice charges.
But, the discovery of confidential papers at Biden’s private house is politically tricky for a serving President, who touts his high ethical standards. His case could complicate the Trump probe.
Reacting to the charges, Biden said on Thursday that “people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously.”
“We’re cooperating fully (and) completely with the Justice Department’s review. As part of that process, my lawyers reviewed other places where documents from my time as Vice President (during the Obama era) were stored, and they finished the review last night.
“They discovered a small number of documents with classified markings in storage areas and file cabinets in my home and my personal library.
“The Department of Justice was immediately notified… So, we’re going to see all this unfold,” he added.
President Biden’s team said that if mistakes were made with his official papers, the administration immediately acted to rectify any errors.
After the first batch of documents was discovered in Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center think tank in November 2022, lawyers turned them over to the National Archives, which handles all such materials, the White House counsel’s office said.
Biden’s lawyers then scoured possible locations for any other stray documents.
To defuse accusations of political interference, Attorney General Merrick Garland named a Chicago federal prosecutor, appointed during the Trump administration, to review the lost Biden documents.