Democrat Reaches for Trump Playbook as He Questions Biden Documents Timing

A Democrat congressman has said that classified documents found at President Joe Biden's private residence in Wilmington, Delaware may have been planted.

Georgia Representative Hank Johnson's comments bear an eerie similarity to excuses that former president Donald Trump has given since the discovery of his own stash of documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Springs, Florida.

Speaking to a reporter on the steps of the Capitol, Johnson said that he wanted the matter to be fully investigated.

"But I'm suspicious of the timing of it," he added. "I'm also aware of the fact that things can be planted on people—places and things can be planted. Things can be planted in places and then discovered conveniently—that may be what has occurred here. I'm not ruling that out."

"It does sound a bit conspiracy-minded," Alex Waddan, an associate professor of U.S. politics at the University of Leicester in the U.K., told Newsweek about Johnson's claims. "It's certainly a story that Republicans are going to run with—you can't really blame them for that. And Democrats who are suggesting it was a plant are rather clutching at straws."

Classified documents were found in the garage of Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware, as well as in an adjacent room that the president later identified as his personal library, the White House confirmed on Thursday.

This discovery by Biden's lawyers in December, along with a prior uncovering of documents in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, in November, prompted Merrick Garland, the attorney general, to appoint a special counsel to oversee an investigation into whether the classified material was mishandled.

While there is no official suggestion that the president tried to prevent the documents from being turned over or that he was aware of their presence, the parallel with the special counsel investigation into Trump has been pounced upon by Republicans and right-wing commentators.

"We wonder why the FBI didn't raid Joe Biden," James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News on Thursday, referencing the federal search in August on Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.

Biden said he was cooperating "fully and completely with the Justice Department's review" in a media briefing on Thursday.

"By the way, my [Chevrolet] Corvette's in a locked garage; it's not sitting out on the street," Biden added, stressing the security of where the documents had been placed—a claim that would appear to somewhat contradict Johnson's suspicions.

Allegations that the documents were planted echo those Trump made himself in 2022 just days after the FBI came for his tranche.

"The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in August.

"Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, 'planting.' Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out?"

Asked if the parallel would make defending Biden harder for Democrats, Waddan said: "It just muddies the waters, in the sense that this was what Democrats would have hoped to have beat Trump with, and legitimately beat him with. It just makes it much more difficult."

Waddan added that Biden's best defense would be carelessness, but even that would play into the narrative that the president "has lost a step in terms of his mental agility."

It is not the first time that Johnson has made outlandish claims. In 2010, he said that the island of Guam, a U.S. island territory in Micronesia, in the Western Pacific, "will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize," though he later claimed this was just a humorous metaphor.

In 2016, Johnson reportedly likened Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories to "termites," which prompted criticism from Jewish organizations. He later apologised for causing offense.