United States President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he is unaware of the contents of confidential documents from his vice presidency with Barack Obama (2009-2017), discovered in a private office 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 delivered the boxes to the archives and we are cooperating fully with the review [dos documentos]said the US head of state, quoted by the agency 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 a “small number of classified documents” last November in a “locked cabinet” at the Penn Biden Center, a “linked to the University of Pennsylvania, and provided then hand them over to the National Archives, responsible for preserving this type of material.
Biden retained an office in that facility after stepping down as vice president in 2017, until shortly before launching his 2019 presidential campaign.
Following that discovery, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the Chicago Attorney General to investigate the matter, according to a source familiar with the trial.
The White House confirmed that the Justice Department was reviewing “a small number of secretly marked documents” found in the office, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reported.
“I was made aware of this discovery and I was surprised to learn that there are government documents that have been brought to that office,” Biden said in the initial response to this discovery.
Regardless of the Justice Department’s assessment of the documents, the revelation that Biden may have misused confidential data could put the head of state in jeopardy, who has challenged former President Donald Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of such documents at his Florida mansion. , could be endangered.
On the Democratic side, Congressman Pete Aguilar, a member of the party leadership in the House of Representatives, expressed support for “the president 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.
Prior to Biden, former US President Donald Trump was also involved in a controversy over the irregular retention of confidential documents.
When he left the White House, Donald Trump took boxes of documents with him, even though a 1978 law requires every US president to hand 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 the tycoon likely kept other files at his luxurious residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
In this regard, on August 8, FBI agents conducted an extensive search of Trump’s mansion, based on a warrant of “confidential preservation” and “obstruction of a federal investigation,” and seized about 30 other boxes.
An intense legal battle then began to determine the nature of the seized documents, some of which were marked “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential”.
This Monday, Trump questioned the FBI’s performance after 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 certainly not been released,” Trump wrote on his social network Truth Social.
Source: DN
