The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said Tuesday that he does not know the content of confidential documents dating from his vice presidency with Barack Obama (2009-2017), discovered in a private office that he sometimes used as a workplace. .
“I don’t know what the documents contain, my lawyers did not suggest that I ask what the documents were about. They turned the boxes over to the archives and we’re fully cooperating with the review. [dos documentos]”said the US head of state, quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP), on the sidelines of the Summit of North American leaders in Mexico City.
On Monday night, Biden’s legal counsel, Richard Sauber, reported that the president’s lawyers discovered, last November, a “small number of classified documents” in a “locked cabinet” at the Penn Biden Center, a ‘linked to the University of Pennsylvania. and proceeded to deliver them to the National Archives, in charge of conserving this type of material.
Biden maintained an office at that facility after stepping down as vice president in 2017, until shortly before launching his 2019 presidential campaign.
Following that discovery, US Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the Chicago Attorney General to investigate the matter, according to a source familiar with the process.
The White House confirmed that the Department of Justice was reviewing “a small number of documents with classified marks” found in the office, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
“I was informed about this discovery and I was surprised to learn that there are government records that were brought to that office,” Biden said in the first reaction to this discovery.
Regardless of the Justice Department’s review of the documents, the revelation that Biden could potentially have mishandled confidential records could compromise the head of state, who called former President Donald Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of such documents in his mansion in Florida.
On the Democratic side, Congressman Pete Aguilar, a member of the party leadership in the House of Representatives, expressed his support for “the fact that the President is following this established protocol.”
Republican Congressman Mike Turner on Tuesday asked the Director of National Intelligence for “a full and thorough review” of the discovery.
Before Biden, former US President Donald Trump was also embroiled in a controversy over the irregular retention of confidential documents.
When he left the White House, Donald Trump took entire boxes of documents with him, even though a 1978 law requires any US president to turn over all his emails, letters and other working documents to the National Archives.
In January, Trump returned 15 boxes, but a federal police investigation estimated that the tycoon probably kept other files at his luxurious residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
In this sense, FBI agents carried out an extensive search of the Trump mansion on August 8, based on an order to “withhold confidential documents” and “obstruction of a federal investigation”, and they seized about thirty boxes. more.
An intense legal battle then began to determine the nature of the seized documents, some of them marked as “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential”.
This Monday, Trump questioned the actions of the FBI before the discovery of confidential Biden documents.
“When is the FBI going to raid Joe Biden’s many homes, maybe even the White House? These documents have definitely not been declassified,” Trump wrote on his social network, Truth Social.
Source: TSF
