US President Joe Biden during a joint news conference in Mexico said that he was surprised to learn that some classified documents were found at his private office he formerly used at a Washington think tank. Asserting that he is fully unaware of the content in those papers, he vowed "full cooperation" with their review.
Biden was in Mexico City with Mexican President Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to attend the 10th North American Leaders Summit. The US President on Tuesday said that he did not know that government records from his time in the vice president's office were taken to his think tank office.
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After his term ended as the vice president for then-President Barack Obama, Biden periodically used the think tank office space from mid-2017 until the beginning of his 2020 presidential campaign. “People know I take classified documents or classified information seriously. When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me, a secure office in the Capitol. The four years after being the Vice President, I was a professor at Penn,” Biden told reporters in Mexico City.
The White House, a day earlier had said that the Department of Justice was reviewing "a small number of documents with classified markings" from the previous Obama-Biden administration which was discovered at Biden’s think-tank office in Washington.
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In his primary response to the discovery, Biden said, “They found some documents in a box, in a locked cabinet, or at least the closet. And as soon as they did, they realised there were several classified documents in that box, and they did what they should have done. They immediately called the archives, turned them over to the archives." He added that the briefing about any government records taken there to that office surprised but he doesn't know what is in the documents either.
The FBI during a raid in August 2021 had found scores of classified documents at ex-president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, over a year after Trump's stint in the President office. Trump also refused to return the documents despite mutiple requests by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). He eventually returned 15 boxes of materials back to NARA in January 2022 and is currently facing investigation for potentially mishandling classified documents.
The White House has convened a call with top allies to explain the investigation surrounding the classified documents in Biden's office, hoping to cut down the growing criticism and questions about the discovery. A White House official characterised the documents as “fewer than a dozen,” two people familiar with the call said none of the documents are “particularly sensitive” and “not of high interest to the intelligence community.”
"My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. I've turned over the boxes. They've turned over the boxes to the archives. We are cooperating fully with the review which, I hope, will be finished soon and will be more detailed at that time,” Biden said.
News of classified records turning up at Biden’s private office is sure to provide new fodder to Trump, who has already announced his 2024 presidential bid, according to CNN. While the differences in both the incidents are huge, given Trump resisted turning over the documents he took, his team now plans to highlight how these documents were found days before the midterm election but nothing was said publicly about it, CNN said.
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(With PTI inputs)
