Edited by |Christian Megan
18- Jan.-2023
Washington

for the first time, the administration of American president Joe Biden replies

to the criticism related to the case of the official documents belonging to president trump that was discovered in his office.
he White House sought to deflect criticism that it is withholding facts about one of the biggest debacles of Joe Biden’s presidency, taking questions Tuesday about batches of classified records found in his home and an old office.

A White House official, Ian Sams, spoke to reporters Tuesday about documents dating to Biden’s vice presidency — the first time the White House has solicited questions about the classified materials. Although he offered little that advanced the public’s understanding of the matter, the mere willingness to address questions was itself a departure from the initial response.

Biden’s Democratic allies have faulted his handling of the controversy, calling on him to be more forthcoming about how the documents wound up in his Delaware home and a think tank in Washington, as NBC News reported last week.

Sams, a senior adviser to the White House counsel’s office, said in the briefing that because of an ongoing Justice Department investigation, the White House is limited in what it can responsibly disclose. Officials are trying to publicly explain what happened without compromising the federal investigation — a difficult balance to strike, Sams said.

“I understand that there is tension between protecting and safeguarding the integrity of an ongoing investigation with providing information publicly,” Sams said.

But legal experts raised questions about the White House’s reticence. At issue is whether the White House kept quiet about documents that had been stored improperly in hope of sparing Biden the political fallout from such a disclosure. A law enforcement official said the Justice Department has not instructed the White House to stay silent about the facts underlying the investigation.

NBC News legal contributor Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of former President Donald Trump, tweeted, “There is nothing about a DOJ investigation that legally prevents someone under investigation from speaking publicly.”

The White House has still left some details unknown. In response to a question, Sams did not provide the precise number of documents that have been found.

“You know, as soon as these records were identified, they were immediately handed over to the proper authorities,” he said. “And so, in terms of contents, in terms of numbers, in terms of the specifics related to the materials itself, we just can’t address that, because these have been handed over to the proper authorities. And these will be part of the ongoing investigation by the Justice Department."

Biden’s private attorneys discovered the first tranche of classified records on Nov. 2, six days before the midterm elections, as they were clearing out an old office Biden had used in Washington from 2017 until he began his presidential campaign in 2020. They gave the material to the National Archives, which in turn notified the Justice Department, setting an investigation in motion.
News of the discovery immediately prompted comparisons to documents recovered from Trump. FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in August and seized classified material stored on the premises. Biden was among those who denounced Trump at the time. "How could anyone be that irresponsible?" he said on CBS' "60 Minutes" in September — before the documents were found in Biden's office.

Biden’s personal attorneys found more classified documents as they were searching his home in Wilmington on Dec. 20. They turned those materials over to the Justice Department.

The White House did not acknowledge the found documents until a CBS News report this month.