Joe Biden
STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT. The new find — like the first, from Biden’s time as vice president — was uncovered in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he often spends weekends, the White House said. Attorney general Merrick Garland said Robert Hur, an appointee of Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, would be given the title of special counsel and empowered to examine whether the cache violated any law.
Garland named federal prosecutor Robert Hur as the special counsel, claiming that Hur would “carry out his responsibility in an even-handed and urgent manner.”
Appointed US Attorney for the District of Maryland by former President Donald Trump in 2017, Hur resigned from that post shortly after Biden took office. He previously worked with FBI Director Christopher Wray, who despite also being appointed by Trump, has been accused by the former president and his allies of “weaponizing” the agency to persecute conservatives.
As Maryland’s chief prosecutor, Hur led an investigation into the theft of classified information by two National Security Agency contractors, securing prison time for both.
The appointment came hours after the White House acknowledged the second batch of papers but did not address their contents — supercharging a growing scandal over a first batch of documents found at a Washington think tank where Biden had an office. The disclosures have prompted comparisons to the special counsel investigation of Trump’s hoarding of hundreds of classified materials at his Florida beachfront home and his alleged obstruction of government efforts to get them back.
The president said a “small number” of documents with classified markings had been found in storage areas and his library and that the Justice Department was notified immediately. Biden declined to take shouted questions from the press, but a White House lawyer said later the documents had been “inadvertently misplaced.”
Biden had told reporters in Mexico City on Tuesday he was surprised to learn of the original find on November 2, saying he did not know that any documents had been taken there. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy joined a number of Republican senators in calling for a congressional investigation
Hur is a former assistant US attorney who worked in the DOJ from 2007 until 2014 and returned to public service under Trump as the principal associate deputy attorney general.
‘Congress has to investigate’
The first cache of Biden documents was discovered a week before last year’s midterm elections but only acknowledged by the White House on Monday, prompting accusations from Republicans of a cover-up.
Trump, who is facing multipole criminal and civil probes, took to his Truth Social platform to call for an immediate end to his investigation “because I did everything right.” Legal analysts have pointed to major differences between the cases, particularly over the size of the huge hoard of documents Trump had stored at his residence after leaving the White House in 2021.
The FBI carted away some 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant in August, and Trump could face obstruction of justice charges after spending months resisting efforts to recover his trove. The White House, in contrast, says it has been “fully cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice.”
After the first batch of Biden documents was discovered at his former office at the Penn Biden Center think tank last November, lawyers turned them over to the National Archives, which handles all such materials, the White House counsel’s office said. Lawyers for Biden then scoured possible locations for any other stray documents.
White House counsel Richard Sauber confirmed this week that Biden’s lawyers had discovered classified documents at an office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, in November. Dating from Biden’s time as vice president, the documents included sensitive information on Ukraine, Iran, and the UK, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Sauber also confirmed that a second box of secret documents was found in a garage at Biden’s Delaware home, and another single file inside the property. Garland said that he authorized a preliminary investigation into the documents in November, before deciding to name Hur special counsel.
With Hur’s appointment, both Biden and Trump are now under investigation for unauthorized removal of classified documents or material. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida was raided by armed FBI agents last August in a pre-dawn operation that recovered hundreds of government documents.
Trump claims that he declassified the files before taking them to Mar-a-Lago, and accused the Biden administration and FBI of orchestrating a “witch hunt” against him.
