Attorney General Merrick Garland has advised the US attorney in Chicago to review a number of potentially classified documents taken from the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington DC — including potentially classfied documents from President Joe Biden’s vice presidential office.
Their discovery, and the subsequent admission by Mr Biden’s team, has set off a firestorm in Washington thanks to the obvious parallels between the president’s situation and that of Donald Trump, the former president. Mr Trump remains under investigation for the illegal retention of presidential records including dozens of classified records after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate last year.
The scope of Mr Biden’s trove is much narrower but regardless is raising accusations of hypocrisy from Republicans who argue that Democrats are holding Mr Trump to a standard that they themselves did not meet.
Here’s what we know so far.
Who found the documents?
In a statement provided on Monday, Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber said that Mr Biden’s lawyers found the documents on in early November as they were “packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center,” the think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania where Mr Biden had an office during his years out of public service.
During that process, Mr Biden’s personal lawyers came across a folder that appeared to contain classified documents and reported the finding to the authorities. In total, the trove contained less than a dozen documents marked classified, with some marked “top secret”.
Who is investigating?
Following their discovery of the potentially classified documents at the think tank, Mr Biden’s attorneys contacted the National Archives and Records Administration. That entity then took possession of the documents and informed the Department of Justice about the situation.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s response was to order John Lausch, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to investigate the handling of the documents and issue a report on the situation.
Mr Lausch is a Donald Trump appointee who is a graduate of Harvard University and Northwestern University. Unlike a number of other Trump-appointed US attorneys, Mr Lausch was not asked to resign when the Biden administration took office in 2021 — on the contrary, Illinois’s two Democratic senators sent a letter to the president requesting that he be allowed to stay on.
The White House said on Tuesday that it was cooperating with the investigation.
“This is an ongoing process under review by DOJ, so we are going to be limited in what we can say at this time. But we are committed to doing this the right way, and we will provide further details when and as appropriate,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House counsel’s office.
Then there’s Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Apparently unhappy with the Biden Justice Department for not keeping his panel in the loop last year after documents including classified materials were taken by FBI agents from Mar-a-Lago, Mr Warner moved on Tuesday to formally request a congressional briefing.
What are people saying?
President Joe Biden is not saying much at all.
On Tuesday he dodged questions from a reporter on the issue, marking the second time in two days he has done so.
Another man is, predictably, quite interested in the finding: former President Donald Trump, who is being investigated for mishandling classified documents in the aftermath of his presidency and had his Mar-a-Lago residence searched by the FBI last summer.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” Mr Trump wrote on Monday evening on the social media platform Truth Social.
Mr Trump, who is running for president again, did not offer any information to back his claim that the documents were “definitely not declassified,” nor did he provide any reason why law enforcement would have reason to search Mr Biden’s homes or the White House.
Other conservatives like far right activist and talk show host Charlie Kirk suggested that the media had covered up the story, even though CBS News was responsible for breaking the story.
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill painted the issue as a double standard, and called for the same FBI raids they had decried just months earlier. Some, like Rep Andy Biggs, veered completely into baseless conspiracy theories, including charges that Chinese government officials supposedly had access to the documents.
What happens next?
Mr Lausch is expected to issue a report at some point that sheds light on the nature of the documents and how they came to be stored in an office that Mr Biden used occassionally between stints in government. Barring any new revelations, the content of that report will likely dictate what happens next.
