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The White House on Friday continued to refer questions to the Justice Department and White House lawyers about what role President Joe Biden might have played in the mishandling of classified documents.
“Just to be prudent here and just to make sure that we are consistent, I would refer you to anything that is related to this, as it relates to the review, to the Department of Justice or my colleagues at the White House counsel office, and this is — we see it as the best way to move forward. We want to respect the process, and so that’s what I’m going to refer you to the Department of Justice,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Asked specifically by ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce if she’s confident Biden followed protocol for handling classified documents, Jean-Pierre didn’t answer directly.
“Again, this is something that he takes very seriously — the president, when it comes to classified documents,” she said. “I’m not going to go into any specifics from here.”
Even if the White House is being transparent in cooperating with the DOJ criminal investigation, the exchange adds to questions about whether Biden has undercut his promise to be transparent with the American people.
The president himself has given incomplete statements, and hasn’t gone as far as his special counsel Richard Sauber, who has said the documents were “inadvertently misplaced,” calling the mishandling a “mistake.”
When the White House earlier this week confirmed a Monday news report that there were classified documents found at his former private office at the Penn Center in November, it did so only after the matter became public.
And in their initial comments after the revelation, neither Biden nor his special counsel mentioned additional classified documents had been found in his Wilmington home a month later.
A day after a CBS News report that classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president were found at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, on Nov. 2, Biden said he was “surprised” and didn’t know their contents.
“I was surprised to learn there were any government records that were taken there to that office,” Biden said, answering a reporter’s question Tuesday at the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico City.
