DOJ Names Special Counsel to Probe Biden's 'Mishandling' of Classified Documents
18:29 GMT 12.01.2023 (Updated: 19:19 GMT 12.01.2023)
CC0 / /
Subscribe
The FBI raided the Mar-a-Lago estate owned by former US President Donald Trump in August on suspicion of potential violations of the Espionage Act and mishandling of documents, finding hundreds of classified files there. Trump has denounced the raid as a "witch hunt," saying the FBI aims to sabotage his 2024 presidential campaign.
After a third batch of unaccounted-for classified documents was found in the possession of US President Joe Biden on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he had appointed a special counsel to handle the investigation.
A special counsel in the US is a lawyer appointed to handle an investigation and any prosecutions that might result from it, if the usual authorities are believed to have a conflict of interest.
Garland told reporters he had appointed Robert Hur, the former US attorney in Maryland, to lead the investigation, taking over for John Lausch, the US attorney from Chicago who Garland had previously assigned to look into the documents.
Hur is also former deputy attorney general and a private practice lawyer with a history of prosecuting white-collar crime. He was appointed as the US attorney for the district of Maryland in 2017 by Trump, with his term ending in 2021.
Lausch was given the job when just one batch of 10 documents was publicly known, after US media revealed on Monday they had been found among personal files in Biden's private office he had once used while a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. However, since then two more reports of classified document discoveries have hit the air waves: one batch in another office of Biden's and another discovery at the Bidens' home in Delaware.
"It's in a locked garage, okay? So it's not like they're sitting out in the street," Biden told reporters on Thursday about the latest discovery. "Yes, as well as my Corvette," he added, when asked to clarify.
12 January 2023, 13:21 GMT
So far, Biden has cooperated with the Department of Justice and the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), to which presidents are supposed to surrender their files when they leave office. While Biden is the sitting US President, the files date to the time when he was US Vice President, from 2009 until 2017.
"Wow, even *I* handled classified documents more securely. At least I kept them encrypted!" quipped Edward Snowden, the former NSA whistleblower who fled to Russia after revealing a vast domestic spying program called PRISM in 2013.
As the investigation of the potential mishandling of sensitive documents by Biden begins to unfold, his predecessor, Donald Trump, has sounded off.
"Merrick Garland has to immediately end Special Counsel investigation into anything related to me because I did everything right, and appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me," Trump said on his Truth Social account on Thursday.
Like Biden, Trump is under investigation for potentially mishandling classified files, but unlike Biden, the FBI raided his Florida home last year and found hundreds of files it had correctly surmised had not been returned to NARA. No charges have been filed against Trump, but he has challenged the DOJ's right to investigate him in the courts.
