Nothing to see here — according to the president.
President Biden dismissed the classified documents found at his Delaware home and private office as simply “stray papers” that ended up on his property because of careless aides who packed up his White House office over a decade ago.
“The best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things that are from 1974 and stray papers – there may be something else, I don’t know,” Biden told PBS News Hour host Judy Woodruff on Wednesday, attempting to contrast his mishandling of classified material to former President Donald Trump’s document scandal.
The 80-year-old president argued that unlike Trump, “no one has had to threaten to do anything” and that he didn’t have his vice presidential and senate documents “laid out” on the floor, with “top secret code word and all the rest” – a reference to the infamous FBI photograph of Trump’s classified White House papers splayed out on a carpeted floor inside his Mar-a-Lago estate.
During the brief interview clip, Biden went on to lay blame on the staffers tasked with packing up his office at the White House at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency for not “thoroughly” looking over “every single piece’ of paper in his office.
“One of the things that happened is that, what was not done well, is as they packed up my office’s 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,” the president said.
Biden didn’t name specific aides who may have packed up the classified material that ended up at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington, DC, and his Wilmington, Delaware, home. But the House Oversight Committee last week sent a formal letter to a close former aide of Biden’s who may have had some involvement.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) asked Kathy Chung, an executive assistant to Biden during his vice presidential years, to make herself available for an interview with the panel’s staff, due to her access to Biden and the Penn Biden Center. Comer also requested all of Chung’s communications with members of the Biden family and Eric Schwerin, the president of first son Hunter Biden’s investment firm.
Chung is one of several former staffers who have reportedly been questioned by the FBI.
Last week, FBI agents conducted a search of Biden’s other Delaware property, his Rehoboth Beach vacation home, and found no additional material with classified markings.
The sweep of the Rehoboth Beach home came 12 days after the FBI searched his Wilmington mansion and discovered sensitive records from his vice presidency and Senate years.
The president’s scandal was sparked by the discovery of at least a dozen classified documents at the Penn Biden Center in November, which the White House kept under wraps through the 2022 midterm elections and for weeks after.
The National Archives was blocked from informing the public about the initial discovery of classified documents by either the White House or the Department of Justice, a source confirmed to The Post last week.
Comer has revealed that Archives general counsel Gary Stern told him he could not tell lawmakers who had ordered the Archives to keep quiet and not put out a press release announcing the Nov. 2 find at the Penn Biden Center.