POLITICO Playbook Daily Briefing
For President Joe Biden, it was an inconvenient discovery — and the potential source of considerable future political, if not legal heartburn. The Justice Department is investigating how and why classified documents from Biden’s time as veep made their way from the White House to a think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, where he used to have an office.
CBS’ Adriana Diaz, Andres Triay and Arden Farhi scooped the news last night, and White House special counsel Richard Sauber confirmed the November discovery and subsequent federal probe, noting in a statement that Biden’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.”
Nedless to say, newly empowered Republicans see the circumstances here as a hell of a lot more than inconvenient — seizing on superficial similarities between this discovery and the August search and seizure of more than 100 classified documents from President Donald Trump’s home in Florida.