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Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has taken issue with the continued handling of President Joe Biden's classified documents situation.
Between November of last year and January, upwards of 25 documents marked as classified were found at various properties associated with Biden, including an attorney's office at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington, D.C., and at his personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware. The documents were found in the months after the FBI found such documents at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence last August after asking for them to be handed over multiple times. The two situations put a renewed spotlight on the issue of sensitive documents and how they are handled by elected officials.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has since appointed special counsel Robert Hur to oversee an investigation into Biden's handling of the documents, with another investigation being opened by the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee. During a Sunday appearance on CBS News's Face the Nation, Warner said that he and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have pressed for more details about the documents to be provided to lawmakers and expressed frustration at the handling of the situation up till now.
"We have an obligation to see these documents and again make sure that if there's any potential compromise, it's mitigated," Warner said. "We took the first step. I'm not satisfied. We have expressed that and it just makes no sense to me that somehow the special prosecutor's equities on the criminal proceeding somehow take precedence over our article one responsibility to oversee the intelligence community. We've made that clear."
Members of the House and Senate received a briefing on Biden's document incident last month, though Warner said the information "left much to be desired." On Sunday, he stressed that the desire for more transparency "is completely bipartisan," with both he and Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, pushing the White House for more information.
"All the Democrats, all the Republicans on the committee feel the same," Warner added. "We also are going to try to press the Justice Department harder to make sure that we do can do our job as well."
Biden and members of his White House staff insisted that they were fully cooperating with investigators in the case, having expressly invited them to check his Delaware residence after the initial discovery of sensitive files at the Penn Biden Center. Critics, especially Republican lawmakers, have nevertheless attacked the president's alleged mishandling of the documents as irresponsible.
Newsweek reached out to the DOJ and White House press offices via email for comment.
About the writer
Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more