President Joe Biden reportedly left roughly ten classified documents in an old office, raising concerns from critics over the treatment of former President Donald Trump over his possession of supposedly classified documents.
While Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago was raided by a mob of FBI agents and the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media called on the Department of Justice to imprison the former president, Biden is apparently being treated with kid gloves.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed U.S. Attorney John Lausch to review the documents, which were found in Biden’s vice-presidential office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., which is close to Capitol Hill.
Biden’s personal attorneys discovered the documents on November 2, according to Special Counsel to president Richard Sauber. Curiously, though the documents were found just a few days before the midterm elections, the news was not reported on until now.
“The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings,” Sauber said.
After discovering the classified documents inside a folder in a box with other non-classified materials, Biden’s attorneys notified the National Archives — who reportedly referred the matter to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Garland then appointed a U.S. attorney to investigate how the documents ended up in Biden’s old office.
Sauber released a statement regarding the discovery of the documents and the procedure followed by Biden’s attorneys.
“The President periodically used this space from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 campaign. On the day of this discovery, November 2, 2022, the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives. The Archives took possession of the materials the following morning,” the statement read.
“The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys. The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives,” the statement continued.
Statement from White House Counsel's Office on cooperation with the National Archives: pic.twitter.com/Wu55efv1DE
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) January 9, 2023
It is currently not clear what level of classification the documents were, though sources say that some of the documents were designated as SCI — or “sensitive compartmented information,” which is used for highly sensitive information that is obtained from intelligence sources. It is still unclear what the contents of the documents were.