WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Wednesday seemed to place some of the blame for how classified documents ended up in his Delaware home and Washington office on staff who packed up the contents of his vice presidential office.
"But one of the things that happened is that what was not done well is as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should have been done, to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there," Biden said in an interview with PBS Wednesday. "But I’ll just let the investigation decide what’s going on. And we’ll see what happens.”
In November, classified documents were found in an office that Biden had used between the time he left office at the end of the Obama administration and when he launched his 2020 presidential campaign. Since that discovery became public in January, more documents were found in Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, home.
The White House has said that the president is fully cooperating with the investigation into how the documents came to be outside of a secure location.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has since named a special counsel to investigate Biden's handling of the documents.
The discoveries have created a political maelstrom for Biden, particularly after Democrats were critical of former President Donald Trump for his possession of classified documents, hundreds of which were found in his Florida estate after the FBI executed a search warrant.
Republicans say that the two men have been treated differently, pointing to a search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate as evidence where a trove of documents with sensitive markings were seized. Democrats argue there's a key difference — Biden is not trying to hide documents and has cooperated with authorities, while the FBI's search of Trump's Florida estate came after months of government effort to recover the material.
Biden reiterated that message in his interview Wednesday, saying that "no one's had to threaten to do anything," and that he "voluntarily opened every single aperture I have — the house, offices, everything, gonna come and look and spend hours searching my home, invited them."
