Following news that documents with classified markings were found in an office space President Joe Biden used between 2017 and 2019, Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) said the Biden administration has enjoyed friendly relations with the media, government bureaucracies, and the U.S. intelligence community, and that instances of potential wrongdoing by Biden and his administration have been “swept under the rug.”
On Monday evening, special counsel to the president Richard Sauber revealed that documents with classified markings were discovered on Nov. 2, just days before the 2022 midterm election. Sauber said White House lawyers alerted the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) immediately after their discovery, and NARA took possession of those documents the following morning. Sauber first publicly revealed the discovery of these classified documents at the Penn Biden Center on Jan. 9, more than two months after they were turned over to NARA.
“Enter Jim Jordan, enter James Comer, my colleagues who are going to be very involved with looking into things like that through the judiciary committee and through the Oversight Committee,” Fulcher said in a Tuesday interview with NTD News.
“These are things that have been, let’s face it, swept under the rug, okay?” Fulcher added. “There’s been a very friendly media, very friendly bureaucracies, the intelligence community has been very friendly to the existing administration. And so we don’t know what the details of these things are.”
Fulcher said the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol breach was “very one-sided” but “now, for the first time, we will get another look at these situations.”
‘The Double Standard Is No Secret’
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and newly appointed House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) raised allegations of a political double standard in how Biden and former President Donald Trump were treated when documents with classified markings were found in either of their office spaces.According to Sauber, White House attorneys who found the documents in the Penn Biden Center handed over those documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) immediately after their discovery. In August, amid disputes about what records Trump was allowed to retain from his presidency, FBI agents carried out a search on his Mar-a-Lago property and recovered documents with classified markings.
On Monday, McCarthy said “Dems overplayed their hand” in their response to the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago and said the Biden administration was ”trying to be political to President Trump.”
Comer said the classified documents cases involving Trump and Biden bring about “further concern that there’s a two-tier justice system within the DOJ with how they treat Republicans vs. Democrats.”
As Fulcher discussed the issue of a potential political double standard, he said, “I don’t think there’s any question about it.”
“Once again, go back to the January 6 Commission,” Fulcher added. “It was very one-sided, they started with a verdict, said, ‘Okay, now we’re going to go substantiate our verdict.’”
“We know for a fact now, FBI knew about it before the election and constrained information about that,” Fulcher said of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“Of course, there’s a double standard. We’ve felt that here on the Republican side media-wise, access to information-wise, restrictions on how we communicate, and censorship with some of our communications versus some of our colleagues on the Democrat side,” Fulcher continued. “The double standard is no secret, at least to me and to our colleagues on the Republican side.”
While Republicans have raised concerns about a double standard on Biden and Trump’s classified documents, Democrats have noted that Biden’s White House lawyers took “immediate” action to hand over the documents they found in Biden’s old office space.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement that attorneys for Biden “appear to have taken immediate and proper action to notify the National Archives about their discovery of a small handful of classified documents so they could be returned to federal government custody. ”
“I have confidence that the Attorney General took the appropriate steps to ensure the careful review of the circumstances surrounding the possession and discovery of these documents and [will] make an impartial decision about any further action that may be needed,” Raskin added.
