President Joe Biden’s attorneys worked with the “Gestapo” at the Department of Justice to secure soft treatment for the sitting president amid a growing scandal involving classified documents, former President Donald Trump said Wednesday.
The Department of Justice reportedly declined to assign FBI agents to monitor the search of Biden’s home under a mutual agreement reached with Biden’s personal attorneys. Department officials reportedly believed that FBI supervision would overly complicate the federal investigation into classified documents related to Biden, and that the supervision was unnecessary with Biden’s cooperation.
“Biden is being treated so much [sic] better than me, I’m shocked (not really!). Why aren’t they raiding his house, & how come his representatives and lawyers are allowed to work together with the Gestapo [sic] in looking for documents, when my lawyers & representatives were not allowed anywhere near the search,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday morning. “We weren’t even allowed to know what they took when they raided my home. ‘Please leave the premises,’ they said, & then lugged out everything they could, including my Passports & Med Recs.”
One of Biden’s personal attorneys found an envelope with 10 classified documents dating back to Biden’s tenure as vice president in a private office the president used at the Penn Biden Center, a D.C. think tank. After the discovery, Biden’s legal team launched a search of Biden’s properties in Delaware — consisting of houses in Rehoboth Beach and Wilmington. The search, approved by the Justice Department, turned up additional classified documents on three separate occasions.
Biden attorneys found a batch of sensitive government documents in Biden’s garage on December 20. Attorneys found an additional document in Biden’s study on January 11, and five more documents again in the study a day later. All materials were turned over to the government, Biden’s attorneys said.
The scandal has drawn bipartisan scrutiny on Capitol Hill. House Republicans have been especially critical of the incident over what they see as a double standard between the Justice Department’s handling of classified documents related to Biden versus those related to Trump.
In August, the FBI raided Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago to recover allegedly classified documents that Trump had refused to hand over to the government. In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland handed the DOJ investigation into Trump’s documents to a special counsel, former war crimes prosecutor Jack Smith.
Garland appointed former U.S. District Attorney Robert Hur as special counsel to take over the DOJ investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has called on the White House to hand over visitor logs of guests to Biden’s home in Delaware in the interest of national security. The logs are needed to see who may have come into contact with the documents, Comer said. The White House and Secret Service has said it does not keep such records.
The White House accused House Republicans of “playing politics” over classified documents on Monday.
“House Republicans are playing politics in a shamelessly hypocritical attempt to attack President Biden,” White House spokesman Ian Sams said. “Their demands should be met with skepticism and they should face questions themselves about why they are politicizing this issue and admitting they actually do not care about the underlying classified material,” he added, referring to Comer earlier expressing concern over the “discrepancy in how former President Trump was treated.”