Several Democratic lawmakers expressed criticism Sunday of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials after the latest discovery of several documents with classification markings.
Senator Dick Durbin in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” said Biden should be “embarrassed by the situation.”
Durbin said that while neither Biden nor former President Donald Trump should have had possession of classified documents, “what happened and followed from it is significantly different.”
Biden’s lawyer said Saturday the FBI had taken six items with documents marked classified from Biden’s home, following the earlier discovery of documents dating to Biden’s time as Vice President that were found at his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.
The Justice Department says Trump took hundreds of records marked classified after his term ended in 2021, and that it had to obtain search warrants to retrieve them after Trump resisted the government’s requests for their return.
“It is outrageous that either occurred,” Durbin said Sunday. “But the reaction by the former president and the current president could not be in sharper contrast.”
Biden told reporters earlier this month that his team “found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place” and that they immediately turned them over to the appropriate departments.
Senator Joe Manchin told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that it was hard to believe that both Biden and Trump were in such a situation, and that special counsel investigations should be completed before rushing to judgment.
“Was one more damaging? Are they both about the same, did not cause any problem, or is one more reckless and irresponsible than the other?” Manchin said. “I can’t answer that question, but I think the special counsel will do a better job than the politicians and the political circus that is going to follow.”
Some information for this story came from The Associated Press.
