WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents erupted into a political crisis with potential legal repercussions Thursday after the attorney general appointed a special counsel to investigate the incident.
Attorney General Merrick Garland named former U.S. Attorney for Maryland Robert Hur, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, to lead the inquiry after the White House confirmed that a second set of classified materials was uncovered inside a garage storage area at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.
“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said at a news conference.
Hur will explore whether any person or entity violated the law and will receive all the resources he needs to conduct the investigation, Garland said.
The naming of a special counsel is a blow for Biden and the White House, which had sought to move quickly past the episode. Garland’s move also intensified questions about why the White House waited until after news reports this week on the discovery of the documents to disclose the episode. The first set of documents were found at an office Biden used after his vice presidency just before November’s midterm elections.
Biden has said he was “surprised” that classified material was found at his old office, and he suggested Thursday that documents found in his garage were secure because they shared space with his classic Corvette. He did not explain why the files were at his home.
“By the way, my Corvette’s in a locked garage, so it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street,” Biden told reporters at the White House after he was asked about the latest discovery.
Biden’s glib remark, which came before Garland’s announcement, risked suggesting that the White House — which has refused to answer many questions about the documents — regards the incident as inconsequential.
A special counsel is already investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents following an FBI search of his Palm Beach, Florida, estate in August. Biden has called Trump “totally irresponsible” for the hundreds of pages of classified materials he and his aides took from the White House after his presidency ended in January 2021.
But with Biden’s own handling of classified material now under scrutiny, Democratic criticism of the former president — and perhaps even the legal case against him — risk being undermined. Many Republicans have complained of a double standard in the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump and Biden cases.
“There’s a process and I’m telling you that we’re trying to do this by the book,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a combative briefing on Thursday. While insisting that the White House had “been transparent here,” she also repeatedly said that she would not “go beyond what the president said” and that she was “limited” in what she could say.
The first batch of classified records connected to Biden were found Nov. 2 as the president’s lawyers were cleaning out his office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington. The White House has said the lawyers immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration, which took possession of the materials the following day.
Garland said the Archives’ inspector general notified the Justice Department on Nov. 4.
The White House has not explained why lawyers were hired to clean out Biden’s old office, nor why Biden’s team waited months to publicly disclose the discovery of the classified material. The documents were found six days before the Nov. 8 elections.
Garland asked John Lausch, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to review the discovery, and Biden’s team began searching other properties connected to him, including his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, homes, for additional records.
Garland said Biden’s aides reported to Lausch on Dec. 20 that they had discovered more classified records at his Wilmington home and that the FBI seized those files.
Lausch recommended to Garland that he appoint a special counsel for the Biden records on Jan. 5, the attorney general said Thursday. Jean-Pierre said the White House learned Hur had been appointed when Garland made the announcement.
Mary McCord, a former top official at the Justice Department, said there are “abundant dissimilarities” in the Biden and Trump cases but that appointing a special counsel to investigate the Biden documents was warranted “to make clear the department’s commitment to independence.”
“In this political environment, given the criticisms of the department as being weaponized and politicized, I don’t see he had any other choice,” McCord said of Garland. She is now executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center.
Biden’s team finished its search of his properties Wednesday night, according to Richard Sauber, special counsel for the White House. Garland said the team reported Thursday finding one additional document in Wilmington. The White House said the document was found among stored materials in an adjacent room.
Though Republicans have sought to draw an equivalence between the Biden and Trump cases, their are still vast differences in both the magnitude of the classified material in their possession and their handling of the documents.
While neither the Justice Department nor the White House has enumerated the records found at Biden’s office and home, the White House has described both batches as “small.” CBS News reported that about 10 classified documents were found at Biden’s office.
The National Archives had not sought the return of Biden’s records, according to the White House.
Trump, on the contrary, had hundreds of pages of classified material at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. After the National Archives asked for their return, he voluntarily sent the agency only some of the materials. The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago based on suspicion he had withheld many of the documents and found them stashed in his office and a storage room near parts of the property accessible to members of his club.
There is no indication that Biden or his aides sought to keep any of the material found at his office or his home or tried to mislead the Archives and Justice Department, as Trump’s associates may have done.
Biden said Thursday that he and his team are “cooperating fully and completely with the Justice Department’s review” of the matter. “As I said earlier this week, people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously,” he added.
After Garland announced Hur’s appointment, Sauber said in a statement that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”
House Republicans, who have largely defended Trump, have said they will investigate whether Biden improperly kept the documents found at his office and home and whether intelligence sources and methods were compromised.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Thursday that Congress should investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, arguing that a double standard had been applied to the Trump and Biden matters. “This is what makes America not trust their government,” he said at a news conference.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said his panel would look into the matter regardless of the special counsel inquiry. “With or without a special counsel, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee will investigate President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and the Swamp’s efforts to hide this information from the American people,” the Kentucky Republican said in a statement.
In his comments Thursday, Biden said he was limited in what he could say about the matter. “I’m going to get a chance to speak on all of this, God willing, soon,” he said.
———
(Bloomberg staff writers Josh Wingrove, Jennifer Jacobs, Billy House, Justin Sink, Akayla Gardner and Zoe Tillman contributed to this story.)
