OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds is demanding answers as President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal only seems to be getting worse by the week.
During an interview on CNN, Donalds left anchor Wolf Blitzer in stunned silence when he flipped the table on Democrats and demanded to know why Biden had classified information in multiple unsecured locations.
“My reaction is pretty simple. I’m wondering why the vice president of the United States had classified documents outside of the hands of the intelligence community. Listen, it’s been pretty clear that presidents do have some classified documents, but the difference between a president and everybody else is the president has the ability to declassify information. The vice president has no ability to declassify information. So number one, what was he doing with classified information in his possession? Number two, why did it take six years? I want to stress this for the American people. Joe Biden left the vice presidency in 2017,” Donalds declared.
Donalds sounded off over former President Donald Trump’s home being raided last August and noted how Biden seems to be getting treated much differently.
“We know other presidents have had classified information, but why was there a raid on Mar-a-Lago, and now this story kind of seeps out and everybody’s saying, ‘Oh, we want to get to the bottom of it,’ and everybody’s giving the benefit of the doubt,” Donalds said.
WATCH:
Federal authorities removed a total of nine boxes filled with documents from an office belonging to an attorney for President Joe Biden, according to a late Wednesday report.
Fox News noted exclusively that the documents were removed from “Biden’s attorney Patrick Moore’s Boston office, but have yet to be reviewed, the National Archives disclosed in a response letter to Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, this week.”
Prior to this, the Archives had not made public the quantity of boxes that were taken from Boston.
It was previously reported that Moore had transported boxes containing documents from the Penn Biden Center to his Boston workplace before uncovering the first batch of classified documents at the think tank in Washington, D.C., Fox News added.
Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall replied to queries from Johnson and Grassley in a letter dated February 24th, regarding the archives’ knowledge of when and how the records were taken to Boston. She stated that the agency became aware of it on November 3rd, 2022, the outlet said.
“When NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] contacted President Biden’s personal counsel on November 3, 2022, to arrange to pick up boxes from the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., they informed NARA that Mr. Moore had moved other boxes from the Penn Biden Center to Mr. Moore’s law firm in Boston,” the letter said, according to the report.
Furthermore, The Archives informed the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General on November 4th that the documents had been relocated. On November 9th, the documents were retrieved and safeguarded at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, the report said.
“NARA staff retrieved nine boxes from Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” Wall continued, which had not previously been reported.
Although The Archives has held the documents since November, they have not yet examined the contents of the boxes to ascertain whether they contain any more classified materials, Fox News added.
It was previously reported that in mid-November, FBI agents searched the offices of the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., following the discovery of a few documents marked as classified there on November 2nd by Biden’s personal lawyers.
More classified documents were subsequently found in Biden’s garage at his Wilmington, Del., home.
In mid-January, the Department of Justice announced that officials were considering searching more locations for classified documents after finding sensitive materials in the garage, CBS News reported.
The search was conducted over a 12-hour period with the approval of the president’s attorneys, unlike the raid on Trump’s home, CNN reported.
Earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier.
Wray claimed that there was no bias and that Biden didn’t get special treatment – something many conservatives do not believe to be true.
