US President Joe Biden at the airport in Santa Clara, California, where he visited on January 19, 2023 to view the damage caused by the recent storms. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP
For Joe Biden, it’s about bringing the soufflé down at his family home and in a circle of reflection after the embarrassing discovery of confidential documents from his vice presidency days.
“Listen, we found some documents (…) that were kept in the wrong place, we immediately turned them over to the archives and the Department of Justice,” said the US President on Thursday, January 19, during a trip to California to journalists who questioned him on the subject.
“I think you’ll see that it’s windy. I regret nothing. I do what the lawyers told me they wanted me to do. That’s what we’re doing,” he continued, adding that he was “fully cooperating” with the judiciary.
This is a thorny issue for the Democratic president who plans to run in 2024, and for Democrats as a whole. The latter did not hesitate to criticize former Republican President Donald Trump, who was the subject of a court investigation for keeping entire boxes of documents when he left Washington in 2021.
Also Read: Is the Case of Secret Documents Discovered in Joe Biden’s Home Similar to Donald Trump’s?
A message denounced by Republicans
As for Joe Biden, the first classified documents were discovered on November 2 at the Penn Biden Center, a Washington think tank where he once had an office, and reported to the National Archives. Then, in December, the president’s attorneys found “a small number of potentially confidential documents” in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and notified the Justice Department. And in January, those lawyers unearthed a confidential document, this time in the room next to the house’s garage. The next day, the attorney for the President’s Office found five more pages there.
Also Read: USA: Joe Biden Says He ‘Don’t Know What’s in the Documents’ Found at One of His Former Workplaces
To allay suspicions of “double standards,” the Justice Department, like Donald Trump, assigned the investigation of Joe Biden’s files to an independent special prosecutor.
The Republican opposition has denounced the Executive Branch’s drip communications. She used her – narrow – majority in the House of Representatives, launched a parliamentary inquiry and demanded more information.
A 1978 law requires US presidents and vice presidents to submit all their emails, letters, and other working documents to the National Archives at the end of their term.
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