Merrick Garland appoints special counsel in Biden classified documents probe
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified material, after the president’s attorneys found stashes of documents in unsecure locations in Washington and Delaware.
“The extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel for this matter,” Garland said in a statement on Thursday.
Garland chose Robert Hur, nominated by former President Donald Trump to serve as the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland from 2018 to 2021, to serve in the special counsel role.
U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch, another Trump appointee who had been running the interim investigation of the Biden documents, will hand over the case to Hur, Garland said.
On Nov. 2, an initial batch of roughly 10 classified documents dating from the Obama administration was discovered at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington by the president’s personal attorneys, who “were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space,” Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, said in a statement to CBS News, which broke the original story.
The president’s attorneys notified the National Archives of the discovery that same day, Sauber said. No one in the Biden administration has explained why the public was not notified, however, until after the CBS report was published on Monday.
Biden has expressed “surprise” at the discovery and said that he would fully cooperate with federal investigators.
Following that initial discovery, however, Biden’s lawyers searched the president’s Delaware residences in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach — “the other locations where files from his vice-presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition,” Sauber said in a statement on Thursday.
“A small number” of additional classified documents were found, primarily in the storage space of Biden’s Wilmington garage alongside personal and political papers, Sauber said.
“All but one of these documents were found in storage space in the president’s Wilmington residence garage,” Sauber said. “One document consisting of one page was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room. No documents were found in the Rehoboth Beach residence.”
In his remarks on Thursday, Garland said that the FBI launched an initial assessment of whether the documents found at the Biden Penn Center were mishandled on Nov. 9. Lausch was appointed to oversee that initial inquiry on Nov. 14.
The Justice Department was informed by the president’s attorneys on Dec. 20 of the discovery of additional documents in Biden’s Wilmington garage, Garland said. On Jan. 12, Biden’s lawyers reported finding additional documents at the Wilmington residence.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, has called for the intelligence community to brief the committee on the classified documents that were uncovered. “Our system of classification exists in order to protect our most important national security secrets,” Warner said.
The committee is still waiting for a briefing on the contents of over 184 classified documents that were being held by Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Several of the documents in Trump’s possession were marked as among the most sensitive in the U.S. government, and the Justice Department is investigating whether the former president obstructed justice by delaying and misleading investigators seeking to locate and reclaim the material. It is not yet clear how sensitive the Biden documents were.
Sauber responded to Hur’s appointment by committing to cooperate with the special counsel.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced,” Sauber said in a statement.
This story was originally published January 12, 2023 at 12:38 PM with the headline "Merrick Garland appoints special counsel in Biden classified documents probe."
