House Oversight Chair Claims National Archives Was Ordered Not to Publicize Biden Classified Docs – Alleges Major Cover-Up
GOP House Oversight Chairman, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), joined Fox News’s Hannity on Tuesday night and made some bombastic allegations regarding President Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents.
Comer alleged that either Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland engaged in a cover-up by ordering the National Archives not to disclose the discovery of documents in Biden’s possession – ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
“Can you tell us what happened? Did they shed any light on any of this?” Sean Hannity began, asking Comer to recap his meeting with the National Archives’s general counsel.
“Well, right before the National Archives came in, they handed us a letter from the Department of Justice informing them and us that the general counsel for the National Archives wasn’t allowed to say anything about the Biden documents,” Comer began, adding:
But we went ahead and we had about a three-plus hour transcribed interview with the general counsel. And what we learned was there is a double standard here with how Donald Trump was treated versus Joe Biden. And I’ll give you an example, Sean. If you go on the National Archives website, there’s pages and pages of press releases and information about the FBI raid into Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents. But there’s nothing on the website about Joe Biden. There wasn’t any press release or anything on the on the website about Joe Biden.
So we asked the general counsel, why were there no press releases sent on Joe Biden once it was determined that he had classified documents in his possession. And the counsel said that he did do press releases, but he was ordered and told they couldn’t be published. So we didn’t ask who, who, who, who gave him the orders. And he said, ‘I can’t tell you that.’
“But there are only two people that could have given him those orders. And that’s either the Department of Justice with Merrick Garland or the White House with Joe Biden. So it shows right there that this Department of Justice and this White House is interfering with this and treating Donald Trump very differently than they’re treating Joe Biden,” concluded Comer.
“Well, I want to hone in on that,” replied Hannity.
“So in the last 48 hours, the last two days now, we have had Jim Jordan’s Committee on Judiciary denied documents by the Department of Justice. Now, you are being shut down in your investigation of the archives, which is critical to getting to the bottom of this. Then we have this whole issue of a double standard. We have five different locations where documents were found with the Bidens,” Hannity said, adding:
Clearly, Hunter Biden, a crack addict at the time, had access to some of these documents. Nobody had to answer for that at this point. They’ve never gone into whether or not. Why hasn’t there been a prosecution in over three years as a result from the Hunter Biden laptop? And why are they ignoring the University of Delaware? There’s this trove of documents that Joe Biden has there. Why didn’t they raid the home of his beach house in Delaware? Why is it they didn’t tell us on or before the November eight midterm that, in fact, Joe Biden had top secret classified documents? Why didn’t they tell us that? In fact, the FBI went to the Penn Biden Center? They treated this entirely differently than the way they treated Donald Trump, haven’t they?
“They have. And another question we asked was why? Why can’t the White House tell us more about the their documents? Are they allowed to talk about their documents? And the general counsel for the National Archives said he didn’t have any problem with the White House being transparent about what’s going on with their investigation,” Comer replied.
“So it’s not the National Archives. It’s the Department of Justice. It’s Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. And remember, Sean, we wouldn’t even know about that the fact that Joe Biden had classified documents in his possession were it not for a leak to CBS News. So someone leaked this out. We would never have heard it from this White House. They would have covered it up forever like all the other cover ups they’re doing with every major part of our investigation into the Biden family influence peddling,” Comer concluded.
Notably, the National Archives first reached out to Trump about his retention of official documents in May of 2021. The archives retrieved some documents in January of 2022 and in February of 2022 the Washington Post first reported that the archives were looking for more documents – only then did the National Archives release a public statement on the matter. The back and forth between Trump’s lawyers and the National Archives resulted in the FBI searching and seizing documents from Trump in August of 2022 — at which time the story became major national news.
Watch the full clip above via Fox News
