“While we may be constrained from being able to provide a ton of facts as this investigation is ongoing, we're being very forthright that we're being cooperative with the Justice Department,” said Sams, special assistant to the president and senior adviser to the White House counsel’s office. “And that's such a stark contrast. I mean, you listen to these House Republicans … they're faking outrage about disclosure and transparency.”
On Saturday, White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that officials found six pages’ worth of classified documents in Biden’s private library at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. He said those documents were immediately turned over to the Justice Department.
The latest discovery adds to a trove found in December in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home, and another set found in November in an office in Washington that he used.
Biden said after the first discovery was announced last week that he was “surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office.”
“But I don’t know what’s in the documents,” he added.
Previously, the Justice Department retrieved about 300 documents at various levels of classification from Trump’s Florida home.
Unanswered questions
In Tuesday’s call with reporters, the White House did not give comprehensive responses to questions about why they delayed by days or weeks in announcing the document discoveries, what the parameters were for the searches, whether they are done searching, what’s in the documents themselves and how many there are, and whether Biden would sit for an interview with the special counsel if he is asked.
Trump, on his social media network, sought to contrast his case with Biden’s, saying that he “did NOTHING wrong [and] have the right as President to “declassify.”
Trump added that he kept the documents securely and that “Mar-a-Lago is a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place, and watched over by staff & our great Secret Service. I have INFO on everyone!”
Biden’s Republican critics have promised swift action.
“President Biden’s three strikes against transparency will be met with swift congressional oversight,” James Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said in a statement on Saturday. “The White House, the National Archives, and the Justice Department failed to promptly inform Congress and the American people about mishandled classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president.”
When asked if the White House would cooperate with Congress, Sams said, “We're reviewing those letters. We'll make a determination about our response in due course. But of course, we're going to call it out when we see rampant hypocrisy that shows a total lack of credibility when it comes to these requests.”
Walter Shaub, a senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, told VOA via email that while the administration was right to promptly inform Justice Department officials after they found the documents, “things might have come out better for the Biden White House if they had done a better job [of]] communicating with the public. At a minimum, they should have been forthcoming with all relevant details when the media first asked about President Biden’s retention of the records.”
