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From the moment the story about President Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents broke this week, the White House has said it acted swiftly and appropriately. «We’re cooperating fully and completely with the Justice Department’s review,» Biden said Thursday morning. «The Department of Justice was immediately notified.»
But new details revealed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in a press conference Thursday afternoon raise questions about the swiftness of Biden’s cooperation in making sure that all classified records were handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
After he announced the appointment of former US Attorney Robert K. Hur to investigate the matter, Garland laid out a chronology of the Biden Administration’s role in notifying NARA and the Justice Department about the mislaid government documents. The timeline contains significant gaps that suggest that either the White House took its time in coming forward about the caches of documents found in Biden’s home and former office, or it inexplicably delayed the relatively straightforward matter of searching for the materials for more than a month.
Forty-eight days elapsed between November 2, when Biden’s attorneys discovered the first batch of sensitive documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC and December 20, when they notified the Justice Department of an additional batch of documents that turned up inside the garage of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware.
