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WASHINGTON (AP) — Newly empowered House Republicans told the White House on Sunday that they had classified secrets at President Joe Biden’s home and former office after more records were found at his Delaware mansion. I requested all information related to the search that found the document.
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said:
Comer, Kentucky has reviewed all documents and communications related to the search by the Biden team, as well as records of visits to the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, from January 20, 2021 to the present. I said I want to He aims to identify who may have accessed classified material and how the records got there.
The White House on Saturday said it found five more pages of classified documents at Biden’s home on Thursday.
In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klein on Sunday, Comer criticized the search by Biden’s representatives when the Justice Department opened an investigation, citing Biden’s “mishandling of classified material. Comer has asked the White House to provide all relevant information, including visitor logs, by the end of the month. requested.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union Address,” Comer called the Biden home a “crime scene,” but admitted it wasn’t clear if the law had been broken.
“My concern is that the special counsel was called in, but then hours later the president’s personal attorney was still there. So it’s essentially a crime, a scene, so to speak,” Comer said.
The U.S. Secret Service provides security for the president’s private residence but does not keep logs of visitors, the agency’s spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said on Sunday.
“Being a private residence, we do not maintain our own visitor records,” Guglielmi said. He added that the agency screens visitors to the president’s properties but does not keep records of those checks.
A White House official did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Biden keeps independent records of people who have visited his mansion.
White House spokesman Ian Samms responded to Mr. Comer’s request for logs and communications regarding document searches. To be honest, don’t touch confidential documents. That says it all. ”
In that CNN interview, Comer added that House Republicans don’t trust the Justice Department to give the issue of classified Biden documents an appropriate level of scrutiny. of Merrick Garland to turn over information related to the discovery of the documents and Garland’s appointment of special counsel Richard Herr to oversee the investigation.
White House officials “can say they’re transparent, but they’re not,” committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told Fox News. He told the channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
White House attorney Richard Sauber said in a statement on Saturday that a search of Biden’s private library uncovered a total of six pages of classified documents from the time Biden was vice president in the Obama administration. The White House previously said it only found one page there.
The latest disclosures come in addition to the discovery of documents discovered in Biden’s garage in December and in his former office at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington in November.
Sauber said Biden’s personal attorney, who didn’t have a security clearance, called off the search after finding the first page Wednesday night. Sauber did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide the latest accounting report. The White House has already faced scrutiny by waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the first set of documents in Biden’s office.
Rep. Jamie Ruskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the Justice Department duly hired a special counsel to “get to the bottom of it” the Biden confidential documents issue and for another investigation. said to have appointed Classified documents stored at former President Donald Trump’s private club and his mansion in Florida.
But Ruskin also highlighted key differences between the two cases, including that Biden’s team submitted documents to the National Archives, but Trump repeatedly resisted such requests.
“We have to maintain a sense of balance and scale in what we’re talking about,” Ruskin told CNN.
Asked on Sunday whether his oversight board would also investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents, Comer objected.
“There have been so many investigations into President Trump, and Democrats have done it over the past six years, that I don’t think they need to spend a lot of time investigating President Trump.
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