AFP Joe Biden, here in Delaware in September 2019, is at the center of a case reminiscent of the spectacular August raid at Donald Trump’s home (here in Florida in November).
Confidential documents from the Obama presidency have been found in a former office of the President of the United States. In August, top secret files were found on Donald Trump’s premises.
UNITED STATES – The discovery is embarrassing. Documents classified as confidential dating from Joe Biden’s vice presidency under Barack Obama – from 2009 to 2017 – were accidentally found in a former office of the current White House tenant, the latter revealed on Monday, January 10 .
Sensitive documents from a previous mandate discovered outside the walls of the White House, does that remind you of anything? In August, the FBI obtained hundreds of confidential documents taken from Donald Trump at the end of his presidency and kept at his Florida residence. A filing that has been widely commented on in the press, in contrast to the discovery made so far at Joe Biden’s premises.
Supporters of the former president have not hesitated to denounce a “double standard” in the handling of these cases. “When will the FBI raid Joe Biden’s many homes or even the White House? ‘ Donald Trump responded in a press release.
But are the two cases really comparable? If each of these discoveries raises questions, the circumstances are very different.
With Donald Trump, whole boxes and nuclear secrets
As for Joe Biden, the papers were accidentally found “in a locked closet” in November while the current president’s lawyers were emptying the premises of a Washington think tank, sometimes used as an office by the current White House chief. Those documents “were not the subject of any prior inquiry or inquiry” from the authorities, his legal adviser Richard Sauber pointed out, and they were immediately turned over to the National Archives.
A notable difference from the Trump case. The former president is leaving Washington in January 2021, returning 15 boxes of documents as a law requires every American president to submit all of their emails, letters and other working documents to the archives. But he keeps dozens more.
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The FBI then decided on August 8, 2022 to conduct a spectacular search of his luxury residence in Mar-a-Lago, Fla., based on a warrant for “withholding classified documents” and “obstructing a federal investigation,” which attorneys had assured before the search that no more government documents were on site.
Investigators recover about thirty boxes in different places of the apartment, in places they consider unsafe. More than 300 documents are classified, some of which have been classified as top secret and are usually only accessible to a very limited circle and under severe security conditions.
Department of Justice/USA TODAY NETWORK via Portal Co. Confidential documents were found August 8 at Donald Trump’s Florida residence, photographed by the FBI.
For their part, Joe Biden’s lawyers have returned fewer than a dozen documents. According to CNN, some of them deal with Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom. Citing an anonymous source, CBS News points out that none of them contain nuclear secrets…unlike the files recovered by Donald Trump.
Joe Biden “surprised” by this discovery
In the case of Donald Trump, as in the case of Joe Biden, the National Archives submitted the information about the discoveries to the US Department of Justice as a matter of procedure. According to CBS News, Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the federal attorney’s office in Chicago to review the Biden documents, and the federal police (FBI) have also launched an investigation. Donald Trump is the subject of a criminal investigation and faces charges.
“The American judiciary prosecutes for misuse of classified documents when there is an aggravating factor: obstruction of justice, storage in an unsecured room, willful violation of law, or lack of loyalty to the United States,” said Barbara McQuade, former prosecutor and legal counsel. “In the case of Mar-a-Lago, all but the last factor seems to be there. In the case of the Biden documents, we have no indication of any of these factors, but the referral to the Chicago Attorney (appointed by Donald Trump) seems reasonable,” she adds.
According to a source interviewed by NBC, Joe Biden discovered the presence of these classified documents in his office when his attorneys told him they had found them. “I was surprised to learn that documents related to the government were brought to this office,” the US president told reporters Tuesday on the sidelines of a summit in Mexico City. His lawyers will “fully cooperate” in reviewing these documents, he assured, hoping that review will end “soon.”
But one video is already being shared among Republican ranks on social media: a clip from an interview with Joe Biden on the famous September show 60 Minutes, in which he called Donald Trump’s March stance “completely irresponsible.” -a-lago case. “How can this happen? ‘ he then asked himself.
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