The affair surrounding US President Joe Biden’s handling of secret government documents is expanding. Attorney General Merrick Garland hired an independent special investigator on Thursday to investigate the finding of various secret documents from Biden’s time as Vice President in his private offices. Biden himself only commented evasively on Thursday, but promised to give answers soon: “I’ll be able to talk about it soon, God willing,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question.
He indirectly admitted what his legal adviser Richard Sauber had said shortly before. Secret documents have been unearthed not only in a private office at a think tank in Washington, but also in two other places in Biden’s home in Delaware: in the library and in his garage, where Biden’s dark green 1967 Corvette is also parked, like a reporter noted. The President answered questions about it in a slightly cryptic way, noting that his Corvette was in a locked garage and not out on the street somewhere.
After the first documents were found in early November, Biden’s lawyers, in consultation with the Justice Department, also combed the president’s home in Delaware and his beach house in Rehoboth Beach. These are the places where Biden had documents sent in 2017, when his tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president ended. On Wednesday evening, the lawyers had now completed the search. According to legal counsel Sauber, “a small number” of classified Obama-Biden administration files were found at Biden’s Delaware home.
The beach house, on the other hand, was clean. The lawyers immediately reported all finds and handed them over to the Ministry of Justice, with which the White House is fully cooperating.
By referring to respect for due process, the White House is attempting to defuse the controversy surrounding the find of documents and Biden’s handling of them. And it tries to mark distance from Donald Trump. After the end of his tenure, he hid several boxes with some top-secret files in his property in Mar-a-Lago and refused to hand them over to the National Archives until the Federal Police FBI carried out a raid there. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented crackdown on a former president, recent news about Biden is particularly politically charged.
Why was the first discovery only made known two months later?
However, the White House has so far refused to answer a number of questions with reference to the ongoing investigation. The files in Biden’s Washington office were found as early as November 2nd. However, this only became public after more than two months, i.e. after the midterm election date of November 8th. And only because the media got wind of it. When Biden’s spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre answered questions about the matter with eloquent silence on Wednesday, a CBS correspondent reminded her of Biden’s promise. “I will make mistakes,” the president had vowed when he took office. “If I make one, I’ll own it.”
The Ministry of Justice also has to put up with questions. The Biden documents were already known there when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel in the Trump case in mid-November. In the Biden case, on the other hand, he had previously only entrusted a federal prosecutor with clarifications. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Garland did select a federal prosecutor who had been employed by Donald Trump.
It is clear that Republicans also called for the appointment of a special counsel in the Biden case – a demand that Garland has now complied with. They will also use their new majority in the House of Representatives to investigate whether the Justice Department was more careful with Biden than with Trump – one of the former president’s old complaints.
The bad news comes at a bad time for Biden
For Biden, the bad news comes at an inopportune time. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, his poll numbers plummeted, and he seemed to have only just managed to reverse the trend. Approval for his leadership is slowly increasing again, and according to the statistics service, it is now down Fivethirtyeight at just over 44 percent, as high as it was almost a year and a half ago.
It is unclear to what extent the recent controversy will affect this. But as a rule, in American politics, it pays more to admit a mistake and ask for forgiveness than to remain silent. This is particularly true of Biden, who did not hold back in criticizing his predecessor in the document affair. “How could that happen? How could someone behave so irresponsibly?” Biden commented in a television interview.