at home and now a special counsel being appointed to investigate. that means this story will now drag on for months, and could well overshadow any plans president biden had to announce soon that he was running for president again in 202a. the white house says it s confident a thorough review will show the documents were inadvertently misplaced, and were handed over as soon as they were discovered. sarah smith, bbc news, washington. earlier i spoke to javed ali, professor at the university of michigan s ford school of policy, who previously served as senior counterterrorism director on the national security council. i began by asking him how damaging this could be for the president. it looks like it will be a major political issue for the biden administration to navigate. how much that affects the agenda over the next couple of years it s too early to tell but this is something that i would think will put the administration on its back foot for quite some time. in terms of the procedure
a first batch had been discovered earlier in his former office at a washington think tank. here s our north america editor sarah smith. after admitting he was keeping classified documents at his delaware home, stored in the garage alongside his vintage sports car, president biden has a lot of explaining to do. classified material next to your corvette what were you thinking?! my corvette s in a locked garage, ok, so it s not like it s sitting out in the street. people know i take classified documents and classified materials seriously. i also said we are cooperating fully and completely withhe justice department s review. earlier this week, we learned that classified documents had been found in a washington office mr biden used after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. that prompted his lawyers to search his residence in wilmington, where a small number of documents were found, and immediately turned over to thejustice department. wholly different, says the white house, to the hund
and could well overshadow any plans president biden had to announce soon that he was running for president again in 202a. the white house says it s confident a thorough review will show the documents were inadvertently misplaced, and were handed over as soon as they were discovered. sarah smith, bbc news, washington. earlier i spoke to javed ali, professor at the university of michigan s ford school of policy, who previously served as senior counterterrorism director on the national security council. i began by asking him how damaging this could be for the president. it looks like it will be a major political issue for the biden administration to navigate. how much that affects the agenda over the next couple of years it s too early to tell but this is something that i would think will put the administration on its back foot for quite some time. in terms of the procedures going forward, we understand that a special counsel has been
today, he appointed another, to look at mr biden s retention of documents. the extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel for this matter. this appointment underscores for the public the department s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. the white house insists that the case of the biden documents is nowhere near as serious as the trump document saga, but parallels keep emerging. classified material being stored at home and now a special counsel being appointed to investigate. that means this story will now drag on for months, and could well overshadow any plans president biden had to announce soon that he was running for president again in 202a. the white house says it s confident a thorough review will show the documents were inadvertently misplaced, and were handed over as soon as they were discovered. sarah smith, bbc news, washington.
a brief explanation on how the two situations actually compare? sure. i mean, they compare at a very high level in the sense that they both had potentially classified materials at their homes after they left office. where they differ is in the quantity when the fbi went to search his former president trump s property in florida, they found dozens of boxes with hundreds of classified and other government documents that had supposed to have been turned over. former president trump s lawyers had even told the justice department they had turned all of these over, and so there was questions there about whether they were misleading authorities and why they had hung onto them after they said they had turned them over. with president biden, at least what we know so far is that he has cooperated, and that means a lot when you are talking about potential criminal liability. stay with us on bbc news.