Kurt Darling
Network Indiana
WASHINGTON — Now that Republicans have control of the U.S. House, Congresswoman Victoria Spartz says one of their top priorities should be oversight of the executive branch.
She tells Indy Politics that the discovery of more Obama-era classified documents in possession of President Biden is troubling and that many questions need to be asked. More sets of classified documents were found inside the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Since the first set of documents was found inside a former think tank office on the University of Pennsylvania where Biden worked after he was Vice-President, the White House has said several times that the president’s personal lawyers are cooperating with a DOJ investigation into why Biden had the documents.
“Oversight of the executive branch, that is one of Congress’s core functions,” Spartz said. “Committees need to start asking really serious questions. What is this administration doing? Because they’re out of control.”
Spartz called out Democrats for not having the same reaction to Biden having classified documents that they did when former President Trump was discovered to have the documents as well. President Biden called the discovery of documents in Trump’s possession “irresponsible.”
“Now you don’t see the same level of aggressive statements against President Biden,” Spartz said.
The main caveat that Spartz believes is a big difference between the situation with former President Trump and President Biden is that the documents in Trump’s possession are from his own administration and that as president, Trump had the authority to declassify whatever he saw fit.
The documents in Biden’s possession were Obama-era documents that he had no authority to declassify from the time he was Vice-President.
Spartz is also curious about why the National Archives knew about Biden having the documents as early as November and that that information was not made public.
Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), said the documents found in both Trump’s case and Biden’s case need to be looked over for national security risks.
“We have asked for an assessment in the intelligence community of the Mar-a-Lago documents,” Schiff said on ABC’s ‘This Week’.
“I think we ought to get that same assessment of the documents found in the think tank as well as the home of President Biden. I’d like to know what these documents were,” he said.
