Susan Walsh/AP
US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday afternoon appointed former US attorney Robert K. Hur to probe the mishandling of classified documents recently located in spaces associated with President Joe Biden that date to his vice presidency.
Garland said that he made the decision to appoint a special counsel due to the "extraordinary circumstances" of the situation, an active investigation into handing of sensitive records by the president and his staff and coming only two months after he appointed a special counsel to oversee the classified records investigation into former President Donald Trump.
"Mr. Hur has a long and distinguished career as a prosecutor," Garland told reporters after announcing his decision. "This appointment underscores for the public the department's commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably only guided by the facts and the law."
Hur previously served as U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland from 2018 to 2021 during the Trump administration. Hur also worked within the Justice Department's leadership before his appointment. After leaving the DOJ, Hur joined the DC office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Garland added that US attorney John Lausch, a Trump appointee who has guided the preliminary investigation, told Garland that he could only lead the initial stages of the probe. Garland said that Lasuch intends to leave the department for the private sector.
Responding to Garland's announcement, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, called the mishandling of documents a "mistake." He reiterated Biden's statement that he takes classified materials serious and that the White House will cooperate with the Special Counsel as it has with the Justice Department.
"We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake," he said.
—Ian Sams (@IanSams46) January 12, 2023
Biden's lawyers discovered a cache of documents and turned them over to the National Archives in November and cooperated with a Justice Department investigation, the White House said in January. The public was not notified.
Additional documents were found at his residence in Wilmington, Delaware, prompting even more criticism by former President Donald Trump and his allies, who are calling for Biden to be prosecuted and accusing the DOJ of a double standard after Trump's Florida estate was searched in August.
The FBI carried out a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home after officials tried for 18 months to recover hundreds of pages of sensitive documents stored at the residence.Trump resisted turning them over.
In November, after the discovery of the first batch of documents in Biden's former private office, Garland announced he was appointing Special Counsel Jack Smith to oversee the investigation of the classified records into Trump, a move that came only days after Trump announced his third presidential run.
Biden on Thursday told reporters that he takes classified documents and materials "seriously."
The president bristled when Fox News' Peter Doocy pressed Biden on whether some of the documents were found next to the president's Corvette as some outlets reported.
"By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage, OK?" Biden said. "So, it's not like it's sitting out on the street."
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, however, charged that Biden was keeping the documents "out in the open" while referencing Biden calling Trump's retention of classified documents "totally irresponsible" on 60 Minutes.
"Here's an individual that sat on 60 Minutes that was so concerned about President Trump's documents locked and behind, and now we find as a vice president keeping it for years out in the open in different locations," McCarthy said on Thursday.
Classified records can not be kept outside of government-controlled spaces, but it's not yet known how sensitive these documents were or if the garage was secured in some way that still would fall short of an authorized space.
CBS News reported on Monday that Garland assigned Lausch, the US attorney in Chicago, to review the case involving about 10 documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, where Biden worked from 2017 to 2019. Biden's personal attorneys found the material on November 2.
Biden told reporters on Tuesday that he was "surprised" when briefed on the discovery and that he didn't know the contents of the materials. Then, NBC News reported on Wednesday that Biden aides found a second batch at a new location.
After the November 2 discovery, Biden's lawyers searched his homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, "the other locations where files from his Vice-Presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition," Sauber, special counsel to the president, said in a Thursday statement.
They completed the review on Wednesday night and discovered a small number of additional Obama-Biden administration records with classified markings in his personal and political papers in Wilmington, Sauber stated. All but one document was found in a storage space in the garage while one other page was found among stored materials in an adjacent room.
"As we stated previously, we are fully cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in possession of the Archives," Sauber stated.
Just before Garland's announcement, NBC also reported that federal law enforcement has interviewed multiple aides who worked for Biden in the waning days of the Obama administration.
Biden told reporters earlier Thursday that he was hoping to speak more on the topic soon.
"As I said earlier this week, people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously," Biden told reporters. "I also said that we are cooperating fully and completely with the Justice Department's review."
McCarthy also made clear that Congress will investigate Biden's handling of the documents. McCarthy suggested the topic could also be fodder for a special GOP committee formed to probe the "weaponization" of the federal government that is modeled after the Church Committee, a 70s-era probe of abuses made by America's intelligence services.
"I think Congress has to investigate this," McCarthy said.
