Founded by chance, these pieces were immediately communicated in the National Archives, according to the White House, and the Minister of Justice appointed a magistrate to examine them. But the Republicans intend to take advantage of this affair.
by Piotr Smolar (Washington, correspondent)
This beginning of 2023 started well for the White House, thanks to the show of republican heartbreak, during the election of the speaker in the House of Representatives.
Monday, January 9, a revelation compromised this favorable pass. According to the CBS channel, the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General Merrick Garland, has appointed a magistrate to examine documents, some classified, found in the premises of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Committee. It is a circle of reflection opened by the president before his election, attached to the University of Pennsylvania. These documents date from the time when Joe Biden was the vice-president of Barack Obama (2009-2017). We do not know the course, the degree of classification, nor the content. But this case is very timely for the Republicans, who immediately seized it.
Joe Biden occupied these premises between mid-2017 and spring 2019, when he launched his presidential campaign. Among the former executives of the center are Steve Ricchetti, help of the president at the White House, and the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
These documents were identified on November 2, 2022 by the president’s personal lawyers, the week before the mid-term elections. They were in a closed wardrobe, which was to be emptied to release an office space, said in a statement Richard Sauber, special advisor to Joe Biden.
This same November 2, the White House alerted the national archives, which took possession of it the next day and informed the Ministry of Justice. In the process, Merrick Garland asked a magistrate appointed by Donald Trump, John Lausch, prosecutor of the North Illinois district, to examine the documents in question. It will come back to him to consider, or not, any suites.
The Republicans hold a reason of revenge
The procedures would therefore have been scrupulously respected from the discovery, without raising all questions about the years preceding. The White House wanted to display its immediate desire for cooperation with the national archives, to insist on the contrast with the behavior of Donald Trump. The latter is at the heart of a federal survey due to the seizure of a huge quantity of classified documents, in August 2022, in his residence in Mar-A-Lago, Florida. The former president immediately commented on Monday the embarrassing revelation for his successor. “When will the FBI [the federal police] search the many residences of Joe Biden, and perhaps even the White House?” He wrote on his network, Truth Social.
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