Add Category
There is no legal requirement that US presidents disclose visitors at their home or at the White House. The Biden administration reinstated disclosures of official guests to the White House and released its first batch of records in May 2021. Former President Donald Trump had suspended the practice shortly after he took office in 2017.
Trump vs Biden document issues
Republicans in the US House of Representatives launched an investigation on Friday into the Justice Department’s handling of improperly stored classified documents possessed by Biden. Comer’s committee is also reviewing the case.
Contained in a court filing by the Department of Justice on August 30 and redacted in part by the FBI, was sA court tunedered photo of documents seized during the August search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.Credit:DoJ/AP
The investigation comes as Trump is under federal criminal investigation for mishandling classified documents after his presidency.
In the Biden case, the president’s lawyers informed the National Archives and Justice Department about finding a small number of documents at a think tank in Washington and later at Biden’s Wilmington home.
Loading
In Trump’s case, the National Archives tried for more than a year after Trump left office to retrieve all of the records he retained, without success. When Trump finally returned 15 boxes of documents in January 2022, Archives officials discovered they contained classified materials.
After the matter was referred to the Justice Department, Trump’s lawyers handed over more material from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and said there were no more documents on the premises.
That turned out to be false. In the end, the FBI recovered an additional 13,000 documents, about 100 of which were marked classified, from the estate.
House Democrats introduced the “Mar-a-Lago Act” in 2017 that would require Trump to regularly disclose visitors to his Florida home, but it was never voted on in the chamber or full Congress.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, the outgoing House Intelligence Committee chairman, said Congress should seek an assessment from the US intelligence community on whether any documents, from either Trump or Biden, jeopardised national security.
“I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts,” Schiff said on ABC’s This Week.
Reuters
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.