Republicans are ripping the Justice Department anew and are vowing to get to the bottom of why DOJ officials allowed personal attorneys for President Joe Biden to retrieve classified documents from at least two locations unescorted and without having proper security clearances.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Attorney General Merrick Garland considered having FBI agents accompany Joe Biden’s personal attorneys as they searched for classified documents at Biden’s two Delaware homes “but decided against it, both to avoid complicating later stages of the investigation and because Mr. Biden’s attorneys had quickly turned over a first batch and were cooperating, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Now, GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Michael Waltz (Fla.) are saying they have big-time problems with DOJ’s hands-off approach and will be demanding answers.
“We are going to get to the bottom of several key things,” Waltz told Fox News early Wednesday morning.
“One, I’m still dying to know why thousand-dollar-an-hour, high-priced attorneys were cleaning out Biden’s office in the first place after five years of those documents sitting there. So, what drove that? And there’s a lot of talk — was it subpoenas from the Hunter Biden investigation that suddenly turned these lawyers into a cleaning crew to start combing through every document. So, what happened there?” he said.
“I know from my time in the White House years ago that there are logs and there’s a tracking system for top secret, especially top secret compartmented information that goes to the president and the vice president,” he added.
“We should be requesting those, and I suspect you’ll see (Judiciary Committee Chairman) Jim Jordan doing that very quickly. And I want him to see a damage assessment from the intelligence community on exactly what these documents were and what sources and methods it exposed,” he said. “I think those are reasonable requests. And the White House is not going to be able to dodge this issue.”
When asked about the DOJ refusal to send FBI agents along with the clean-up attorneys, Waltz said Democrats expect Americans to simply “accept” what Biden’s personal attorneys tell them, like they expected Americans to simply accept what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said when she was allowed to ‘inspect’ her own emails that had been subpoenaed by a House committee.
“You know, the left is making much of, well, it was only 20 documents. Well, how do we know that?” Waltz asked.
“I guess we have to take that at face value now. And the White House was too nervous to have a federal agent, at least alongside the attorneys, because…anything that the Bureau sees could also be constituted as a potential crime,” he continued. “So they decided not to have them there at all, and the rest of the world and Americans have to just take Biden’s attorneys at face value.”
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There is also the fact that Biden allegedly took the documents when he left the Obama administration; as vice president, he did not have the authority to declassify them like former President Donald Trump, and we have not heard anything from former President Obama indicating whether or not he declassified them for Biden.
Time will tell. But for now, this all looks like another huge example of a two-tiered justice system in America: One for Republicans, and one for Democrats, the latter of whom are never punished.
