Attorney GeneralMerrick Garlandannounced Thursday the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the storage of classified documents that were found at PresidentJoe Biden’s offices and at his Delaware home in recent weeks.
Garland said Robert Hur, a former U.S. Attorney in Maryland who also served as a senior Justice Department official during the Trump administration, will serve as special counsel.
As CBS News reported earlier this week,one batch of government documentswas found in a locked closet in November at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.
Speaking at a news conference in Mexico, the president said he does not know what’s in the “small number” of documents, but that they have been turned over to the National Archives.
“They immediately called the (National) Archives, turned them over to the Archives, and I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office,” Biden said during a visit with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“We’ve cooperated fully with the review, which I hope will be finished soon,” Biden added.
President Joe Biden.Susan Walsh/AP/Shutterstock
On Thursday, the White House confirmed that more documents from Biden’s time as vice president had been found, with the president saying they were in a “locked garage” of his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
“They discovered a small number of documents with classified markings in storage areas and file cabinets in my home and my personal library,” Biden told reporters.
It is unclear exactly how many documents have been found.
Republicans have criticized Biden for his handling of the documents, particularly as their discovery comes in the midst of an investigation into former PresidentDonald Trump’s handling of government documents.
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The first batch of documents discovered at Biden’s offices reportedlydid not contain nuclear secretslike those found at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. Instead, they included briefing materials about foreign countries from Biden’s time as vice president, sources told theTimes.
Federal agents who served the warrant at Mar-a-Lago ultimately left with more than 100 documents after Trump had reportedly assured officials that he had no more classified materials at the property. Government filings indicate they recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago last year.
In that situation, aspecial counselhas also been named.
source: people.com
