Washington Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York said it is “baffling” that the FBI didn’t take part in the document searches at President Joe Biden’s residence and office, leaving it instead to his lawyers.
“Obviously if the Justice Department turned down the opportunity to take part in the discovery of these classified documents … you have to wonder whether they just didn’t want to know,” York said on Fox News’s The Story with Martha MacCallum.
“Now the FBI doesn’t know anything … because they turned down the opportunity to go along. It really is baffling,” he said.
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York compared the differences between the documents found in Biden’s possession and those uncovered during a raid last August on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
“Remember that photo they released? It was all of these classified document covers spread out on the floor. Now, that was done for show. They weren’t discovered that way,” York explained, adding that it would be necessary for the FBI to see how documents were actually stored in the investigation.
“The FBI would notice all that, and that would affect how the Justice Department thought about the care with which President Trump or in this case, President Biden, was handling these documents,” he said.
York said the Justice Department is likely treating the two cases differently because of bias.
“They treated a Democratic president different than they treated a Republican former president,” York said. “That’s a possibility.”
A special counsel was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the classified documents taken at Mar-a-Lago. Another was similarly appointed to address the documents found in the president’s Penn Biden Center office in Washington, D.C., and his private residence in Wilmington, Delaware. However, the timeline for Biden has been criticized heavily over the last week.
York pointed out that special counsel appointments often cut off the flow of information to the public and even to lawmakers, such as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been left in the dark.
“Even when [Jordan] asked the Justice Department what’s going on, they say, ‘Sorry, we can’t talk. It’s an ongoing investigation.’ So that’s what special counsels do. They shut down the information flow,” he said.
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A new Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday revealed that more than 60% of those surveyed believed Biden’s handling of the documents was “inappropriate” but “not criminal.”
“The president has kind of admitted to mishandling classified information. … I don’t think there’s any question about that,” York said in response.
