First find before the midterm elections
The fact that the White House now has to concede another find is extremely unpleasant for the President. Because even before that, the government headquarters had only released piecemeal information and the public as a whole had not been informed for a long time.
The first tranche of confidential government documents was discovered on November 2 – shortly before the US congressional elections. According to a report by US broadcaster CBS, this included top-secret material. The White House emphasizes that Biden’s lawyers immediately informed the National Archives, which is responsible for storing such documents. However, the public only found out about it when the media reported on the delicate find last Monday. As a reaction to the first discovery when clearing out the private offices in Washington, according to the consultant Sauber, Biden’s employees then looked for further documents in other places and finally found what they were looking for in Wilmington.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the case on Thursday. Garland disclosed that Biden’s team had informed the Justice Department on December 20 that the classified information was found in the Wilmington garage. However, the White House did not confirm this garage find in the first public statement a few days ago, but only in response to media reports. This too met with a great deal of misunderstanding.
Republicans counter criticism
Biden, like many weekends, was in Wilmington on Saturday when news of the new find broke. For the president, the revelations are politically very sensitive – not only because it is not allowed to store confidential government documents privately after leaving office, because in the USA the national archive is responsible for this.
The finding of documents at Biden is also very explosive because former Republican President Donald Trump caused a scandal with a similar case in the summer: after leaving the White House, Trump kept large amounts of confidential government documents in his private estate in Florida , including a number of top-secret documents. The FBI searched the property in August and confiscated various classified documents. Biden criticized Trump’s handling of the documents at the time. Now he himself is being subjected to severe criticism from Trump and his Republicans. They have now taken over the majority in the House of Representatives and have already initiated the first parliamentary investigations into Biden’s documents.