President Joe Biden has distinguished the documents found at locations he used and the classified materials taken from former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.
During an interview with ABC News, Biden said he has dealt with his classified documents issue in a “fundamentally different” way than his predecessor.
He added that there’s no comparison to how he and Trump mishandled the sensitive material.
Pres. Biden tells @DavidMuir that "there's degrees of irresponsibility" when it comes to the DOJ's investigations into both him and former Pres. Trump over the discovery of classified documents. "There's nothing for me to hide." he adds. https://t.co/wIixdvC4aq pic.twitter.com/j1euQZY9Pr
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) February 25, 2023
When asked if anything was irresponsible in his handling of classified documents, Biden said, “There’s degrees of irresponsibility. There can be significant degrees of irresponsibility.”
“The way in which the boxes were packed up from my office—apparently, not everything was gone through as meticulously as it should have. But there was no intention,” he added.
Earlier, during an interview with CBS News, he commented on the classified materials recovered from Trump’s residence, saying, “how that could possibly happen, how one-- anyone could be that irresponsible.”
Biden told ABC News that he commented on Trump’s case because of the media coverage of it that showed documents that federal agents found at Mar-a-Lago.
“You guys were showing on television things lying on the ground that said ‘top secret.’”
Biden was referring to circulated photos showing documents that federal agents had laid out, although the image didn’t represent how Trump stored the papers.
Speaking about how he has dealt with inquiries from law enforcement differently than Trump, he said, “The difference is, every single, solitary thing I’ve done, I’ve done voluntarily.”
“I’ve invited the Justice Department to come into every aspect of any place that I had any control of. So there’s no need for search warrants,” Biden added.
Earlier this month, during an interview with PBS News, Biden dismissed the classified documents found at his Delaware home and private office.
He had said that the documents were just “stray papers” that ended up on his property because of careless aides who packed up his White House office over a decade ago.
“The best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things that are from 1974 and stray papers – there may be something else, I don’t know,” Biden said.
In January, Biden's lawyer Bob Bauer said some of the classified documents and materials which were found at his residence were dated from Biden's tenure in the U.S. Senate, where he represented Delaware from 1973 to 2009.
Photo: Created with images from Gage Skidmore on flickr
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