It has come to light that Vice President Joe Biden’s legal team conducted an unsupervised search of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, looking for classified documents (DOJ).
A Wall Street Journal report claims that the DOJ considered having FBI agents witness the search conducted by Biden’s attorneys but finally decided against it because doing so would have “complicated” the investigation, and Biden’s legal team had been helpful.
After finding ten classified papers at the vice president’s office at a think tank in Washington, D.C., Biden’s legal team planned to investigate the rest of the president’s properties. According to WSJ, people in the know said that DOJ officials met with Biden’s lawyer before the search and agreed to let Biden’s staff search without immediate clearance from the FBI.
Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., director Joe Biden’s office was searched for secret material on Tuesday, November 2, 2022, less than a week before the 2022 midterm elections. On December 20, several confidential documents were found in Biden’s garage, and on January 11th and 12th, copies of the same materials were discovered in Biden’s study and survey.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have sought answers from the White House and claimed a double standard in the DOJ’s handling of sensitive data about former President Trump and Vice President Biden in light of the document scandal. The Republican head of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer (KY), has requested that the White House offer a full accounting of who was invited to Biden’s Delaware home and, therefore, may have seen the classified documents. The White House and the Secret Service have publicly said they do not have such records.
The FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August to recover classified documents the president had previously refused to hand up. In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland turned the investigation into Trump’s files to former war crimes prosecutor Jack Smith in the Department of Justice.
Garland selected former U.S. District Attorney Robert Hur as the special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The White House accused Republican lawmakers of “playing politics” on Monday by releasing classified material.
Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House, said, “House Republicans are playing politics in a hypocritical attempt to denigrate President Biden.” He said, “Their demands should be met with skepticism, and they should face questions themselves about why they are politicizing this issue and admitting they do not care about the underlying classified material,” referring to Comer’s earlier concern over the “discrepancy in how former President Trump was treated.”