WASHINGTON: US Attorney General Merrick Garland named Thursday an independent prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.
This came after a furor over secret papers found at his former office exploded with the discovery of a second batch at his private residence.
The new find, from Biden’s time as vice president, was uncovered at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he often spends weekends, his lawyer said.
Garland, who runs the US Justice Department, said private attorney and former government prosecutor Robert Hur would be given the title of special counsel and empowered to examine whether the cache violated any laws.
“As I have said before, I strongly believe that the normal processes of this department can handle all investigations with integrity,” Garland said.
“But under the regulations, the extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel for this matter.”
Garland’s announcement came hours after the White House acknowledged the second batch of papers in a statement that did not address their contents — supercharging a growing scandal over a first batch of documents found at a Washington think tank where Biden had an office.
The disclosures have prompted comparisons to the special counsel investigation of former president Donald Trump’s hoarding of hundreds of classified materials at his South Florida beachfront home and his alleged obstruction of government efforts to get them back.
“People know I take classified documents and classified material seriously. We’re cooperating fully (and) completely with the Justice Department’s review,” Biden told reporters.
“As part of that process, my lawyers reviewed other places where documents from my time as vice president were stored, and they finished the review last night.”
The president said a “small number” of documents with classified markings had been found in storage areas and his library and that the Justice Department was notified immediately.
Biden declined to take shouted questions from the press, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called for a congressional investigation into the discovery and the earlier find, in a closet at his former office in Washington.
Biden had told reporters in Mexico City on Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn of the original discovery on November 2, saying he did not know that any had been taken there.
Hur, a former assistant US attorney who worked on counterterrorism and corporate fraud in the DOJ from 2007 until 2014 and returned under the Trump administration as the principal associate deputy attorney general, is expected to begin work in the coming days.
“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability and particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts, and the law,” Garland added.
The first cache of Biden documents was discovered a week before last year’s midterm elections but only acknowledged by the White House on Monday, prompting accusations from Republicans of a cover-up and the unequal application of the law in the two cases.
“I think Congress has to investigate this,” newly installed House Speaker McCarthy told reporters at his first news conference.
“Here’s an individual that’s been in office for more than 40 years. Here’s an individual that sat on ‘60 minutes,’ that was so concerned about President Trump’s documents, locked in behind, and now we find... a vice president keeping it for years out in the open in different locations.”
Trump had earlier demanded on his Truth Social platform: “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?“
Legal analysts have pointed to major difference between the cases however, particularly over the size of the huge hoard of documents Trump had stored at his residence after leaving the White House in 2021.
The FBI carted away some 11,000 papers after serving a search warrant in August, and Trump could face obstruction of justice charges after spending months resisting government efforts to recover his trove and his failure to comply with a subpoena demanding their return.
The White House, in contrast, says it has been “fully cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice” since the Biden discovery.
After the first batch of Biden documents was discovered at his former office at the Penn Biden Center think tank last November, lawyers turned them over to the National Archives, which handles all such materials, the White House counsel’s office said.
Lawyers for Biden then scoured possible locations for any other stray documents.
Nevertheless, serious questions remain about when the second batch of documents was unearthed, who took both sets from the White House and if they have been accessed since Biden left the vice presidency in 2017.
US Justice Dept names special counsel for Biden documents probe
https://arab.news/rhz7g
US Justice Dept names special counsel for Biden documents probe
- The new find, from Biden's time as vice president, was uncovered at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington
- Private attorney and former government prosecutor Robert Hur would be given the title of special counsel and empowered to examine whether the cache violated any laws
Justice Department says it’s releasing 3 million pages from its Jeffrey Epstein files
- The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act
- “Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche said
NEW YORK: The Justice Department said Friday that it was releasing many more records from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, resuming disclosures under a law intended to reveal what the government knew about the millionaire financier’s sexual abuse of young girls and his interactions with rich and powerful people including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
The files, which were being posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.
The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his confidant and onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the act,” Blanche said at a news conference announcing the disclosure.
The prospect of previously unseen records tying Epstein to famous figures has long animated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and others who have clamored for a full accounting that even Blanche acknowledged might not be met by the latest document dump.
“There’s a hunger, or a thirst, for information that I don’t think will be satisfied by review of these documents,” he said.
He insisted that, “We did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect — or not protect — anybody,” Blanche said.
After missing a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress to release all of the files, the Justice Department said it tasked hundreds of lawyers with reviewing the records to determine what needs to be redacted, or blacked out.
Among the materials being withheld from release Friday is information that could jeopardize any ongoing investigation or expose the identities of potential victims of sex abuse. All women other than Maxwell have been redacted from videos and images being released Friday, Blanche said.
The number of documents subject to review has ballooned to roughly six million, including duplicates, the department said.
The Justice Department released tens of thousands of pages of documents just before Christmas, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs and court records. Many of them were either already public or heavily blacked out.
Those records included previously released flight logs showing that Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet in the 1990s, before they had a falling out, and several photographs of Clinton. Neither Trump, a Republican, nor Clinton, a Democrat, has been publicly accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and both have said they had no knowledge he was abusing underage girls.
Also released last month were transcripts of grand jury testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who said they were paid to perform sex acts for Epstein.
Epstein killed himself in a New York jail cell in August 2019, a month after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.
In 2008 and 2009, Epstein served jail time in Florida after pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. At the time, investigators had gathered evidence that Epstein had sexually abused underage girls at his home in Palm Beach, but the US attorney’s office agreed not to prosecute him in exchange for his guilty plea to lesser state charges.
In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Texas, after being moved there from a federal prison in Florida. She denies any wrongdoing.
US prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse of girls, but one of his victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused him in lawsuits of having arranged for her to have sexual encounters at age 17 and 18 with numerous politicians, business titans, noted academics and others, all of whom denied her allegations.
Among the people she accused was Britain’s Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after the scandal led to him being stripped of his royal titles. Andrew denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.
Giuffre died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia last year at age 41.
