President Joe Biden is “fully cooperating” with the Department of Justice’s investigation into his handling of classified documents, according to the White House, but a former FBI assistant director said he is being treated with “kid gloves.”
“President Biden is committed to doing the responsible thing and acting appropriately,” said the White House counsel’s office spokesman Ian Sams on Tuesday.
As previously covered by The Dallas Express, classified documents from the Obama administration were discovered inside the Washington offices of the Penn Biden Center and in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. On January 12, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate Biden’s potentially illegal possession of the documents.
Sams said that the White House withheld the discovery of the documents until last week because officials had to work within the constraints of the DOJ’s investigation.
“Information is going to develop. That’s a natural part of any investigation,” he explained. “As soon as the searches were underway looking for additional documents to be properly handed to the government, we wanted to be respectful to provide as complete information as we could, trying to balance with the need to provide information to you all consistent with the investigation.”
Sams accused Republicans of responding to the discovery of Biden’s possession of classified documents far more harshly than they did when classified documents were uncovered at Mar-a-Lago — former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence.
“They’re interested in making this political theater and political stunts,” he argued. “In the last few days, we’ve seen an eagerness among House Republicans to make their lack of credibility known. They’re focusing on things that they did not focus on in previous circumstances. They’re making contradictory claims on television about the underlying purposes of their inquiries.”
However, the DOJ has been criticized for being softer on Biden than they were on Trump.
A former FBI assistant director said there is “a glaring disparity in how somewhat identical facts are treated when it comes to the Bidens.”
Chris Swecker, who served for 24 years as an FBI special agent and retired as assistant director for the criminal investigative division, said the DOJ is handling the situation with Biden in a “genteel” way.
“You know, it’s kid gloves, it’s going about it in a very nice way, very genteel,” he said, adding that the department seems to be allowing Biden to decide which documents are taken from the property and examined and which ones are not.
Swecker said, “This is yet another example, I think, of the genteel way the left and the right are handled.”
