President Joe Biden did not appear too concerned about the investigation into classified documents discovered at his home and office.
During an interview, PBS’s Judy Woodruff explained to Biden, “It’s clear there’s a difference between the way you’ve handled this and former President Trump.”
She continued, “You’ve cooperated with the Archives, with the FBI. But I want to ask you about, quickly about what you said last September. You said just possessing classified documents is, you said, ‘Totally irresponsible.’”
Woodruff asked Biden, “So what was totally irresponsible about the fact that you had some?”
Biden responded, “They’ve informed me not to speak to this issue — to any way, try to prejudice the investigation that’s going on.”
He explained, “But what I was talking about was what was laid out. All these documents were top secret, code word, and all the rest. I’m not at liberty, and I’m not even sure — I made voluntarily — no one has had to threaten to do anything. Voluntarily open every single aperture I have with the house, offices, everything, for them to come and look and spend hours searching my home — invited them.”
The president continued, “And 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.”
According to Biden, “One of the things that happened is that what was not done well is as they packed up my offices 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. But, I just let the investigation have, you know, decide what’s going on and we’ll see what happens.”
Watch Biden’s comments below:
President Biden tells @JudyWoodruff files found at his Delaware home and private office are “to the best of my knowledge … from 1974 and stray papers.” https://t.co/x2wbLMyl6O pic.twitter.com/Ns03CUTFeG
— PBS News (@NewsHour) February 9, 2023
In November, classified documents were discovered in the office Biden used following his time with the Obama administration.
More documents were later found in Biden’s home in Delaware.
Last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Robert Hur, to look into the handling of the documents.
“The very extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel,” Garland said at the time.
He added, “This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”