Legal expert pours cold water on GOP's Biden document freakout
In a column in the Daily Beast by attorney Shan Wu, GOP glee about President Joe Biden's documents from his years as Vice President to Barrack Obama discovered in a locked storage room at the Penn Biden Center is much ado about nothing.
On Monday it was revealed an attorney working for the president discovered the documents and immediately notified the National Archives so that they could retrieve them.
That, in turn, led Republicans to seize on the news as a way of trying to undercut the DOJ investigation of Donald Trump's boxes of documents kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he refused to return until the FBI obtained a search warrant to enter and seize them.
According to Wu, who previously served in the DOJ, beyond demagoguery, Republicans should not expect anything to come from an investigation ordered by Attorney General Merrick Garland being overseen by U.S. Attorney John Lausch.
As the attorney noted, a representative from the National Archives already stated that the possession of the Biden docs was likely a mistake that was the result of lack of clarity over what was permissible to keep.
Wu also noted that, in the Donald Trump case, refusal to return the documents is central to special counsel Jack Smith's investigation.
"The recovery from Trump of highly sensitive documents pertaining to national security—including ones related to nuclear secrets—came after more than a year of requests, negotiations, grand jury subpoenas and meetings between Trump’s representatives, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Justice Department that culminated in a criminal search warrant being executed on Trump’s home," Wu wrote before adding, "In contrast, Biden’s lawyers notified the National Archives on the same day the documents were found “in a locked closet” and the documents were retrieved by the National Archives the next morning. Biden’s lawyers’ prompt actions displayed a transparency and disregard for political consequences given that they discovered the documents on Nov. 2—only days away from the midterm elections."
He continued, "The facts as we know them so far make it highly unlikely that Lausch will find evidence of criminal behavior on the part of Biden and/or his team given the lack of any effort to conceal or obstruct, which would be critical in finding any criminal intent."
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