US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that he has appointed an independent prosecutor to investigate the case of secret official documents found at President Joe Biden’s home and in an office he used to use in the past.
“I have signed a document pursuant to which he has appointed, Robert Hoare, a special prosecutor” who has “the power to investigate any person or entity who may have violated the law” in this case, the minister said in a brief statement.
“There will be respect for the rules during investigations of classified documents,” Garland added.
On Thursday, the White House said that President Biden’s legal team had found a second set of classified documents dating back to his time as vice president at his home in Delaware.
The acknowledgment of this discovery, stored in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, came via a statement from Richard Sauber, the president’s special adviser, and after the White House said on Monday that other documents were found in November in a safe in an office of the University of Pennsylvania in Washington that Biden had used. After leaving the post of vice president.
An adviser appointed by Garland in November is considering whether to charge former Republican President Donald Trump with taking classified documents from the White House when he left office in 2021 and refusing to hand them over for several months.
One difference between the two cases is that Biden’s lawyers said they handed over the documents when they were located, while Trump resisted that until the FBI conducted a search of his home in August, which raised questions about whether he or his staff obstructed Investigation.
Biden in September called Trump’s handling of classified documents “totally irresponsible”. Congressional Republicans described the discovery of the documents in Biden’s possession as evidence of his “hypocrisy”.
“As I said earlier this week, people know that I take classified documents and classified materials very seriously,” Biden told reporters Thursday. “As I said, we are cooperating fully and fully with the review that the Justice Department is conducting.”
He added that his legal team discovered a few confidentially marked documents in storage areas and filing cabinets in his personal library at his home in Wilmington. The library is attached to his garage, which Biden said was closed.
The White House did not say if further searches were under way or how the documents ended up at either site.
On the other hand, Republican US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy urged Congress to investigate Biden after secret documents were found at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
“Congress should investigate this matter,” McCarthy said, referring to the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump for keeping more than 100 classified documents at his home in Palm Beach, Florida.