Newly elected House Republicans on Sunday demanded the White House turn over all information related to its searches, which revealed classified documents in the wake of more records found at President Joe Biden’s home and former office at his Delaware residence.
“We have a lot of questions,” said Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
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.
The White House confirmed that since becoming president, Biden has not independently kept records of who has visited his residence.
White House spokesman Ian Sams said, “Like every president in decades of modern history, his private residence is private.” “But upon taking office, President Biden reinstated the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitor logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration had abolished them.”
Indeed, President Donald Trump’s administration announced early in his presidency that they would not release visitor logs because of “serious national security risks and privacy concerns of hundreds of thousands of visitors annually”. Democrat Barack Obama’s administration initially fought efforts by Congress and conservative and liberal groups to obtain visitor records. But after being sued, it began voluntarily disclosing the logs in December 2009, posting records every three to four months.
A federal appeals court ruled in 2013 that the log could be withheld under the president’s executive privilege. The unanimous decision was written by Judge Merrick Garland, who is now serving as Biden’s attorney general.
Asked about Comer’s request for logs and communications regarding the discovery of the documents, Sams replied: “I’ll just refer you to what Congressman Comer himself told CNN this morning: ‘At the end of the day. I, my biggest concern is not classified documents. To tell you the truth.’ 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 that Garland turn over information related to the discovery of documents and information related to Garland’s appointment of special counsel Richard Hur to oversee the investigation.
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.
read all breaking news Here
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)