newly empowered House Republicans demanded on sunday white House Turn on all information related to your searches, including the classified presidential documents revealed Joe Biden’s home and former office in view of more records found at his Delaware residence.
“We have a lot of questions,” said Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
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Comer, R-Ky., said he wants to see all documents and communications related to the searches by the Biden team, as well as the visitor logs from Jan. 20, 2021, of the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. He said the aim is to determine who might have access to classified material and how the records got there.
The White House said on Saturday that it had discovered five additional pages of classified documents at Biden’s home on Thursday, the same day a special counsel was appointed to review the matter.
In a letter Sunday to White House chief of staff Ron Klain, Comer criticized the searches conducted by Biden representatives while the Justice Department was launching the investigation and said Biden’s “misappropriation of classified materials” raises whether they put our national security at risk.” Comer demanded that the White House provide all relevant information, including visitor logs, by the end of the month.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Comer referred to Biden’s home as a “crime scene,” though he acknowledged it was unclear whether laws had been broken.
“My concern is that the special counsel was called in, but hours after that we still had the president’s personal counsel, who has no security clearance, still roaming around the president’s residence, looking for things. are doing — I mean that would essentially be a crime scene, so to speak,” Comer said.
Agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said on Sunday that although the US Secret Service provides security at the president’s private residence, it does not maintain visitor logs.
“We do not independently maintain our own visitor log because this is a private residence,” Guglielmi said. He said the agency checks visitors to presidential properties but does not keep records of those checks.
White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Biden independently maintains records of who has visited his residence.
When asked about Comer’s request for logs and communications regarding the discovery of the documents, White House spokesman Ian Sams replied: “I will just refer you to what Congressman Comer himself told CNN this morning. : ‘At the end of the day, my biggest concern is ‘not classified documents to be honest with you.’ Everyone says this.
In that CNN interview, Comer had said that House Republicans did not trust the Justice Department to give Biden’s classified documents case the proper level of scrutiny. The House Judiciary Committee on Friday requested Attorney General Merrick Garland provide information related to the discovery of the documents and information related to Garland’s appointment of special counsel Richard Hur to oversee the investigation.
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White House officials “can say they’re being transparent, but it’s anything but,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
White House counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement on Saturday that a search of Biden’s personal library totaled six pages of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president in the Obama administration. The White House had earlier said that only one page was found there.
The latest disclosure was in addition to the discovery of documents found in Biden’s garage in December and his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington in November.
Sabir said Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have a security clearance, called off their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber received the remaining materials on Thursday as it was being facilitated by the Department of Justice to retrieve them. Sauber did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of an initial set of documents in the Biden office.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said the Justice Department has hired special counsel to “get to the bottom” of the Biden classified documents case as well as a separate investigation. Classified documents on former President Donald Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
But Raskin also stressed key differences between the two cases, including the ease with which Biden’s team handed over documents to the National Archives, compared to Trump’s repeated resistance to such requests.
“We must have a sense of proportion and measure in what we’re talking about,” Raskin told CNN.
Comer demurred when asked Sunday whether his oversight committee would also investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents.
“There have been a lot of investigations of President Trump, I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time investigating President Trump, because the Democrats have done that for the last six years,” he said.
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Madhani reported from Wilmington, Delaware.
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