Media: Biden advisors find more secret documents

New development in the document affair that Joe Biden is dealing with: According to this, lawyers for the current president have found secret government files at another location – after they had already found an envelope with 10 documents were encountered.

Further details about the second find were not immediately available. So it remained unclear where these files were kept and from which period they came. The first find is said to be documents from Biden’s tenure as Vice President Barack Obama. Biden kept them in private premises, which he moved into in 2018 – as the namesake of the Penn Biden Center think tank, which is part of the elite University of Pennsylvania.

In his only public statement to date, Biden said on Tuesday that he was “surprised” when his lawyers informed him about the find. “But I don’t know what was in the documents.”

Biden spokeswoman dodges questions

His spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre emphasized on Wednesday that Biden takes dealing with secret government files seriously. She also said that the president’s lawyers “did the right thing” when they found the documents. They immediately contacted the national archives authority NARA, which is supposed to be in possession of government files from resigned presidents and vice presidents.

However, during the daily press conference in the White House, Jean-Pierre steadfastly refused to provide any further information about the affair – despite aggressive inquiries from the journalists present. For the time being, it remains unclear when Biden was informed about the find. Instead, Jean-Pierre said several times: “This is an ongoing process”. The Ministry of Justice is currently investigating the matter and does not want to intervene in this process.

Call for another special investigator is loud

Attorney General Merrick Garland has yet to comment on his agency’s investigations, which are headed by an Illinois prosecutor. Some Republicans are already calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Senator Josh Hawley, who is flirting with a presidential candidacy in 2024, published a statement on the short message service Twitter with the words “Special counsel”.

Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith in mid-November to shed light on Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump’s document affair. Like Biden, Trump allowed secret government files to run after he retired. In contrast to Biden, however, Trump refused to cooperate with the archive authority and the federal police FBI. Instead, he lied about the hoarded documents. (Special Counsel Smith is also investigating the role Trump played in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.)

Biden worked for the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the full name of the think tank, in 2018 and 2019. The University of Pennsylvania appointed him Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor in February 2017 after his resignation as Vice President. He has a private office in a modern building in Washington, not far from the Capitol.

Between 2017 and early 2019, when his (ultimately successful) presidential campaign began, Biden also worked for the Biden Cancer Initiative, which is headquartered in Washington. He is also the namesake of an institute at the University of Delaware, his alma mater. It is said that he was a frequent guest on the campus in Newark (Delaware). Biden also owns homes near Wilmington, Delaware and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.