US President Joe Biden, in Washington, January 4, 2023. MANDEL NGAN / AFP
This beginning of 2023 started well for the White House thanks to the spectacle of Republican heartbreak at the election of Speaker in the House of Representatives.
However, on Monday 9th January a revelation marred this cheap pass. According to CBS, the Attorney General, Attorney General Merrick Garland, has appointed a judge to review documents, some classified, found on the grounds of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. This is a think tank opened by the President prior to his election and is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. These documents date from when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s Vice President (2009-2017). We know neither the course, nor the degree of classification, nor the content. But this case comes at a good time for Republicans, who took it up immediately.
Joe Biden occupied these premises between mid-2017 and early 2019 when he launched his presidential campaign. Former leaders of the center include Steve Ricchetti, White House adviser, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
These documents were identified by the President’s personal attorneys on November 2, 2022, the week before the midterm elections. They were in a locked closet that had to be emptied to free up office space, Richard Sauber, special counsel to Joe Biden, said in a press release.
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On the same November 2, the White House alerted the National Archives, which took possession the next day and informed the Justice Department. In the trial, Merrick Garland asked a Donald Trump-appointed judge, John Lausch, attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to review the documents in question. It is up to him to consider possible consequences or not.
Republicans swear revenge
The procedures would therefore have been scrupulously followed since the discovery, but without raising all the questions of the previous years. The White House wanted to express its immediate desire to work with the National Archives to emphasize the contrast with Donald Trump’s behavior. The latter is the focus of a federal investigation into the August 2022 seizure of a large quantity of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida residence. The former president immediately commented on the embarrassing revelation for his successor on Monday. “When did the FBI [la police fédérale] will Joe Bidens raid many homes and possibly even the White House? he wrote on his network Truth Social.
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