Congressional Republicans are pursuing answers about President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents on multiple fronts as the White House stonewalls the public about the case.
House Republicans had spent months carefully planning the investigations they would launch if their party won a majority in the lower chamber in November.
And while those investigative targets remain priorities — including an investigation of the border security disaster, which the House Oversight Committee has already launched — the Biden documents case has consumed much of the earliest efforts from top House committees.
In the Senate minority, Republicans are also kicking off an investigation into the Biden documents case.
The involvement of a special counsel has complicated the matter by giving the White House a messaging shield behind which to hide and exempting the Department of Justice from some obligations to cooperate.
But Republicans are still working to glean what they can from agencies involved in the discovery and oversight of Biden’s improperly stored classified documents.
HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
Led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), the House Judiciary Committee has focused more on how the Justice Department conducted itself than on the substance of the law enforcement case against Biden.
Jordan announced on Jan. 13 that his committee’s first investigation would involve the document saga, signaling its importance to Republicans.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland that same day, Jordan and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) asked the Justice Department to provide any documents related to Garland’s appointment of the special counsel, Robert Hur, and any internal DOJ communications about how the early days of the investigation unfolded out of the public’s view.
The GOP Judiciary Committee members also asked for information related to the Justice Department’s knowledge of precisely how Biden’s team stored classified information at both his private office in Washington, D.C., and at his Wilmington, Delaware, residence.
Jordan set a deadline of Jan. 27 for the Justice Department to comply.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have pursued several different routes in their efforts to get more information out of the Biden administration.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) wrote a letter to the National Archives two days before Garland’s appointment of Hur as special counsel.
In it, Comer questioned the agency’s “inconsistent treatment” of Biden and former President Donald Trump, the latter of whom ultimately faced an FBI raid over a document dispute that began with a referral from the National Archives.
Comer asked the acting archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, for communications among National Archives staff and between the National Archives and the Justice Department about the discovery of the classified documents at Biden’s Washington, D.C., office. At the time, the existence of additional classified documents at Biden’s private residence was not yet known.
National Archives officials missed a Jan. 24 deadline set by the House Oversight Committee to turn over information related to Biden’s classified documents scandal in the first of what could become many attempts to slow-walk responses under the Biden administration.
Comer said his panel wanted to investigate potential “political bias” at an agency that had kept the Biden document situation hidden from the public for more than two months.
The National Archives responded previously on Jan. 18, denying the charges of bias and telling Comer that any future document requests would need signoff from the special counsel’s office to be fulfilled.
Comer has also sent multiple requests to the White House counsel’s office regarding who searched for classified documents and when.
The House Oversight chairman asked the White House counsel to provide a list of all classified documents retrieved from both the Washington, D.C., office and the Wilmington house, as well as a list of the names and security clearances of aides tasked with searching for the documents.
Comer offered a deadline for that request of Jan. 27.
White House counsel Stuart Delery responded on Monday, pledging to work in “good faith” to satisfy Comer’s requests.
Shut down by the White House’s insistence that no visitor logs for the Wilmington house exist, Comer this week pressed the Secret Service to provide information about who has visited the president’s private residence since he left the vice president’s office in 2017 given that classified records from immediately before that time surfaced in the Wilmington garage and other rooms.
Comer gave the Secret Service a deadline of Feb. 6 for that request.
HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee pressed Secretary of State Antony Blinken for information regarding classified documents at the private Washington, D.C., office in a letter on Monday.
“The Foreign Affairs Committee is concerned about the national security and foreign policy implications of classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center, where you and several high-ranking State Department officials worked prior to your current executive branch appointments,” McCaul wrote in the letter to Blinken.
The Penn Biden Center was the academic nonprofit organization that housed Biden and some of his aides during his four years out of power, and the center’s Washington, D.C., office housed classified information until Biden’s lawyers discovered it in November.
McCaul asked Blinken for any correspondence he may have had since November about the documents found at the Penn Biden Center office, which he led before ascending to the top of the State Department.
The letter set a deadline for Blinken of Feb. 6.
SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
Not to allow their House colleagues with subpoena power have all the fun, Senate Republicans have also engaged the Biden administration on the classified documents imbroglio.
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) penned a letter to the Secret Service on Monday asking for “a full and complete list of all individuals who entered the locations where classified records relating to then-Vice President Biden’s tenure have been identified.”
Grassley serves as the Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member, and Johnson is the top Republican on the investigative subcommittee within the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Grassley and Johnson gave the Secret Service a deadline of Feb. 2 for their request.
Also on Monday, Grassley and Johnson wrote a separate letter to the National Archives to request information about how much effort the agency put into recovering records from Biden’s time as vice president.
The Republicans asked for, among other things, a detailed timeline of the agency’s efforts to recover Biden’s classified records and a list of locations other than the ones under investigation where Biden kept government records since leaving the Obama administration.
This request also gave the National Archives a Feb. 2 deadline.
