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President Joe Biden is facing his own classified documents scandal after Obama-era documents were discovered in the think-tank office used by Biden years after the Obama administration ended.
On Monday, the White House announced that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is reviewing "a small number of documents with classified markings" found at the Penn Biden Center by the president's personal attorneys.
Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, said that since the documents were found, "The president's personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives."
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch—one of the few U.S. attorneys held over from former President Donald Trump's administration—to conduct the review over the Biden documents.
According to Lausch's profile on the DOJ website, his office is "widely recognized for significant prosecutions involving international terrorism, violent crime, public corruption, cyber crime, financial fraud, narcotics, civil rights and numerous other criminal and civil matters."
The Harvard graduate received his law degree from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in 1996.
He began his career as a law clerk for the Honorable Michael Stephen Kanne of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1999. Lausch spent more than a decade as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Illinois, trying more than 20 jury cases and serving as the deputy chief in the Narcotics & Gangs Section from 2005-2010, during which he oversaw criminal prosecutions of corrupt public officials, fraud schemes and street gangs.
In 2010, he went to work in private practice in Chicago, focusing on corporate investigation and other litigation matters. In August of 2017, he was appointed by Trump to serve a U.S. Attorney. He was sworn into office that November.
Unlike 55 other Trump-era attorneys, Lausch was not asked to resign after the Republican president left office in 2021, according to his office. Democratic Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth issued a statement shortly after Biden's inauguration, arguing that Lausch should be allowed to stay on to wrap up sensitive investigations.
The discovery of classified documents traced to Biden bear resemblance to the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August, when agent seized boxes of more than 200,000 pages of presidential material from Trump's Florida estate. Sauber has contended that in Biden's case, the documents were handed over willingly and not discovered at a private residence.
But the discovery has caught the attention of Trump, who demanded over Truth Social, "When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?"
Newsweek reached out to the DOJ for comment.
About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek senior reporter based in New York City. She has covered U.S. politics and culture extensively. ... Read more