Biden says he is surprised by the case of classified documents, and the White House reiterates collaboration

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The President of the United States, Joe Biden, said this Tuesday (10) that he was surprised by the discovery, in a private office, of confidential documents from the period in which he was vice president of Barack Obama (2009-2017). The democrat, who claimed to be unaware of the contents of the files, reiterated his collaboration in clarifying the case.

“We are cooperating fully with the analysis, which I hope will be completed soon,” Biden said in Mexico, where he is participating in a regional forum that focuses on the issues of migration and drug trafficking with his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Biden spoke a day after his lawyers revealed the discovery of documents in a room at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. The space was used frequently by the Democrat from 2017 until the start of his presidential campaign in 2020.

The case has been politically exploited because Donald Trump is being investigated for having kept confidential US government materials in one of his properties in Florida. Last year, FBI agents, the American federal police, carried out an operation to recover the papers, in an unprecedented action in recent US history against a former president of the country.

According to the White House, however, the cases are very different – ​​the discovery of documents that would belong to Biden was not due to any previous request and there was no resistance to recover confidential documents, unlike what happened with the former president.

Biden, who has previously called Trump irresponsible for keeping secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort home, said on Tuesday that he takes the new findings seriously. At the same time, he sought to disassociate himself from the case by suggesting the possibility that someone else had taken the papers out of the White House without his knowledge.

“I was surprised to learn that there are government records that were taken to that office. I don’t know what’s in the documents,” Biden said.

The case is under review by the Department of Justice. In a statement, the White House reported that it collaborates with the investigations and that it notified the National Archives and Records Administration on the same day that the documents were found – the papers would have been delivered shortly afterwards.

Mike Turner, Republican representative of the House Standing Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter asking US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to request “an immediate review and damage assessment” of the case involving Biden.

“The discovery of classified information would place the President in potential violation of laws that protect national security, including the Espionage Act and the Presidential Records Act,” Turner said.

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