President Joe Biden’s legal team has discovered additional classified material in a second unspecified location. The revelation comes days after an attorney for the president said Biden’s lawyers had discovered a “small number” of classified documents at his former office space in Washington.
Things are seemingly getting worse for Biden with the revelation that additional classified documents were found at a second location, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The person did not say when or where the material was found or specific details about the level of classification of the documents.
White House officials have said that they are cooperating with the Justice Department and that Biden’s lawyers quickly handed over the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration — the agency tasked with handling presidential records.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden’s handling of classified information and the West Wing’s management of the discovery. She said the White House was committed to handling the matter in the “right way,” pointing to Biden’s personal attorneys’ immediate notification of the National Archives.
It is sort of strange, but the discovery of the classified documents on November 2, 2022, came not long before Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee the agency’s criminal investigation into former president Donald Trump’s possible mishandling of hundreds of classified documents that were taken to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency ended, according to the Washington Post.
To review the discovery of Biden’s classified documents, Garland tapped U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr. of Chicago, a holdover from the Trump administration. Depending on what this initial investigation yields, Garland could decide to appoint a special counsel.
Keep in mind that while the investigation of both Biden’s and Trump’s alleged keeping of classified material is somewhat similar, it is not as it seems.
In the case of the Trump investigation, it is now centered on what officials have described in court papers as possible obstruction of the efforts to recover all of the documents, and there were literally boxes of documents.
So far, no such allegation has been leveled in the Biden matter, though it is at an earlier stage. It is intriguing that the discovery of the first batch of documents was found on Nov. 2, after which the administration kept a tight lid on the humiliating news lest it affect the midterm elections six days later.
I’m wondering just how much politics is involved in this whole sorry mess.
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