Joe Biden hands in classified files

The White House has been left red-faced after the discovery of classified documents from the Obama administration were found at a former office of Joe Biden.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

The White House has been left red-faced after the discovery of classified documents from the Obama administration were found at a former office of Joe Biden, complicating the Justice Department’s potential prosecution on Donald Trump for related, albeit more serious, misdeeds.

One of the US President’s lawyers, Richard Sauber, on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) said the administration was co-operating with the Justice Department and the National Archives after “a small number of documents with classified markings” were found at the Penn Biden Centre for Diplomacy in Washington during a clean-out of the office space.

At least two files were marked “highly classified”, according to separate reports.

“The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives,” Mr Sauber added, in a seeming effort to distinguish this situation from that of Mr Trump, who last year refused to return hundreds classified documents to the National Archives from his Mar-A-Lago home in Florida.

The former president’s home was searched in August by FBI agents who confiscated about 20 boxes of documents, some of them marked classified, which came after a long exchange between federal officials and the former president’s representatives.

“When will the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team storm one of Biden’s many vacation homes bought and paid for somehow by a lifetime of being a humble public servant?” Mr Trump tweeted in the wake of the latest revelations.

“These documents were definitely not declassified.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment, nor did the White House ­explain why it waited until now to reveal the November 2 discovery of documents, one week before the midterm elections.

“How anyone could be that ­irresponsible?” Mr Biden told 60 Minutes last year when questioned about Mr Trump’s behaviour.

The President, on a visit to Mexico City, for a North America Leaders summit, didn’t respond to questions about his documents shouted at him by journalists after meeting Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Republican staff on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee mocked Democrats’ lack of condemnation of the President with a string of siren emojis on ­social media.

The White House’s embarrassment came as a period of infighting among Republicans appeared to come to an end, foreshadowing the establishment of a series of congressional committees to ­investigate the Biden family, the US government’s Covid-19 response and the relationship ­between Big Tech and the intelligence community.

New Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy, elected by a slim margin after a highly unusual 15 rounds of voting last week, passed his first political test as Speaker, shepherding a new set of rules through the house.

The 55-page set, which included multiple concessions to a small group of Freedom Caucus Republicans in exchange for their vote, passed the chamber 220-2013 with only one Republican dissenter.

The package reversed a rule change by former speaker Nancy Pelosi that had made it difficult to dislodge a sitting speaker.

Henceforth, only one member will be required to call a “vote to vacate”.

Members will have 72 hours to consider bills before voting on them. And bills that increase spending in net terms, or relate to more than one distinct topics, will be banned from consideration.

“For far too long, Democrats have run roughshod over the norms and practices of the people’s house, weaponising the rules of the house to protect themselves and the Biden administration from proper oversight,” congresswoman Michelle Fischbach said.

Democrats uniformly opposed the new rules; Chellie Pingree, a congresswoman from Maine, said the new rules made “clear that extremists were setting their agenda, not Speaker McCarthy”.

“He didn’t have the votes to be Speaker, so he made concession after concession to a radical wing of his caucus just to hold the gavel.”