Biden administration shares mishandled classified documents with Gang of Eight

Washington: According to five people with knowledge of the situation, the Biden administration has started sharing classified documents with the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of lawmakers. These documents were discovered in the possession of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and former Vice President Mike Pence. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and other prominent lawmakers have been pleading with the Justice Department to grant access to the documents or at the very least a description of what is contained in them so that Congress can assess the potential risk to national security. According to the persons, who insisted on remaining anonymous to disclose personal communications between the Justice Department and Congress, that process very just got started. “They’re finally moving. We’ve got a lot more documents to review and, more importantly, to make sure there was mitigation taken,” Warner said Wednesday, adding that the documents were being received on a rolling basis. He said that while he was “glad to see progress,” it is “still unacceptable for me that it took this long.” A Justice Department special counsel, Jack Smith, is investigating whether Trump mishandled roughly several hundred documents with classified markings that were taken after his term ended to Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida estate, and whether he or his representatives sought to obstruct that probe. Another special counsel, Robert Hur, is also investigating the improper retention of documents from Biden’s time as vice president that have been located in his Delaware home and his pre-presidential think-tank office. Biden has said he had no knowledge the documents were there. A lawyer for Pence also said in January that an apparently small number of papers were inadvertently boxed and transported to his Indiana home at the end of the Trump administration. Punchbowl News first reported the development. The Biden administration held a classified briefing on the documents earlier this year for members of Congress, but senators accused the executive branch of stonewalling and insisted that they needed for national security reasons to see for themselves what materials the men had been holding. The Justice Department had said that it wanted to be cooperative with the lawmakers’ demands within the confines of the ongoing investigations. Read all the Latest News, Trending News,  Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.