The US attorney general on Thursday named an independent prosecutor to investigate US President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, after a furor over secret papers found at his former office erupted with the discovery of a second batch.
The new find — like the first, from Biden’s time as US vice president — was uncovered in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he often spends weekends, the White House said.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Robert Hur, an appointee of former US president Donald Trump, would be given the title of special counsel and empowered to examine whether any laws were broken.
Photo: AP
“I strongly believe that the normal processes of this department can handle all investigations with integrity,” but “the extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel,” Garland said.
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 classified materials at his Florida beachfront home and his alleged obstruction of government efforts to get them back.
“I take classified documents and classified material seriously. We’re cooperating fully [and] completely with the Justice Department’s review,” Biden told reporters.
“As part of that process, my lawyers reviewed other places where documents from my time as vice president were stored,” he said.
The president said a “small number” of documents with classified markings had been found in storage areas and his library, and that the US Department of Justice was notified immediately.
Biden declined to take questions from the media, 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 Nov. 2, saying he did not know that any documents had been taken there.
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.
“I think Congress has to investigate this,” US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters.
“Here’s an individual... that was so concerned about President Trump’s documents. Now we find... a vice president keeping it for years out in the open in different locations,” he said.
Legal analysts have pointed to major differences between the cases, particularly over the number of documents Trump had stored at his residence after leaving the White House in 2021.
The FBI carted away about 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant in August, and Trump could face obstruction of justice charges after 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 in 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.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS