(Presidentialwire.com)- The House GOP has responded quickly to the revelation that classified documents have been found in two different office spaces run by President Joe Biden.
Earlier this week, Representative Mike Turner, the top member of the GOP on the House Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence community in the U.S. should conduct a “damage assessment” about those classified documents.
The request from Turner was sent on Tuesday directly to Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. It said that the fact that Biden retained the classified documents puts him in “potential violation of laws protecting national security, including the Espionage Act and Presidential Records Act.”
Whatever comes of the situation, it certainly doesn’t look good at all for Biden, who’s gone on the offensive regarding former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents that he took to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. In fact, Biden said the decision by Trump to keep hundreds of classified records at his home “irresponsible.”
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice said it was reviewing “a small number of documents with classified markings” that the president’s personal attorneys found when they were clearing out offices of the Penn Biden Center.
The president has kept an office there starting when he departed as the vice president under the Obama administration in 2017 through the time when he launched his campaign for president in 2019.
In the letter he sent to Haines, Turner wrote:
“Those entrusted with access to classified information have a duty and an obligation to protect it. This issue demands a full and thorough review.”
In September, Haines agreed to do a “risk assessment” of Trump’s classified documents case rather than a “damage assessment.”
While there are obvious similarities between the two situations of Trump and Biden, there are many differences, too. The main one is that there’s a grand jury investigation currently ongoing into Trump’s classified documents, which the FBI seized as part of a raid on his Florida home back in August.
That being said, Biden is certainly going to be in some hot water for his own case. Even members of his own party have no choice but to speak up and investigate. That includes Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, who recently said they needed to be briefed about the documents.
He said this week:
“Our system of classification exists in order to protect our most important national security secrets, and we expect to be briefed on what happened both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden office as part of our constitutional oversight obligations.
“From what we know so far, the latter is about finding documents with markings, and turning them over, which is certainly different from a months-long effort to retain material actively being sought by the government. But, again, that’s why we need to be briefed.”
Democrats can try to brush this whole ordeal off as nothing serious, but it’s surely going to come back and haunt liberals and Biden for the next two years.
