it makes joe biden doubly irresponsible. in the trump case, unfettered authority before he leaves office to declassify documents. joe biden sean: let me ask you a question, this is important. there is no set standard or procedure that a president needs to follow to declassify information. i know president trump was on the show, i could declassify it i am done. that is all it takes. is that true? that s right. there are recommendations in the executive branch you notify effective agencies. no provision that says president has to tell anybody or pit it in writing. he can do it act on his own.
perspective that everybody said is correct. there s going to be nuances. i ll tell you, the u.s. attorney in chicago is a very fair man. mr. lauch. and so i think we can trust his word. politically, there s not going to be seen as much of a difference because the only thing in this kind of era where there s all this information that hits you from different sides and we kind of get information overload, the only thing that s needed right now by the former president is to be able to throw doubt and say look, this happened, too, over here. so from a political perspective, this is actually probably pretty bad. not just for the president, but really for the idea of getting the justice through the political system. now, there will be a lot more details to come out. the question is who is interested in the nuances or in just simply saying see, it happened over here, too. let me say real quick, too, as a guy that s wrapping up, i had wrapped up my office in congress. i never once saw anything
information, any classified information, especially at the sci level, any sources and methods, anything like that could have been damaged or exposed as a result of having these documents in a location that is from what we can tell, would not have been a place that you house classified documents. that s marpart of what has beene problem for former president trump. the idea that you have these documents, there are requirements of how you handle them, where you put them. in locked compartments, certainly to make sure sources and methods are not exposed. that is what the u.s. attorney in chicago is now doing a review of to make sure there s no damage or what damage could have been done as a result. there s no question that this is in a political context. following the trump documents. but i spoke to a source who s very familiar with the documents, what happened. this is not a partisan source. this is someone who is a
once again, lawyers for president biden finding crlasse documents from serving in the obama administration in one of his private offices. they found the documents last november. the matter is now in the hands of the u.s. justice department which is investigating. joining us now live, republican congressman donaldson of florida. let me get your reaction to the breaking news. you re a member of congress. you deal with classified information. what s your reaction to this? oh, 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 documented, but the difference between a president and everybody else is the president has the ability to declassify information. the vice president has no
then i asked him, are you concerned about donald trump having apparently more documents at mar-a-lago that were classified than joe biden had during his tenure as vice president at his private office. he went on to say democrats overplayed their hand on mar-a-lago. and he said it s more important that you see this vice president after all these years still having these documents. he then walked onto the house floor. another member of the top republican member james comer who is going to chair the house oversight committee, that has oversight over the national archives. he told me he plans to send a letter within the next 48 hours to the national archives asking for more information about these classified documents. so republicans seeing an opening here after this revelation. even they said very little about donald trump and criticized the justice department, now criticizing the president for if he indeed mishandled these classifies documents. not surprised that that reaction is com