Special counsel named over Biden documents

US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents when he was vice-president in the Obama administration.

Biden acknowledged on Thursday that aides found a classified document in his "personal library" at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and other documents in his garage, prompting the attorney general to name Robert Hur, a former Donald Trump-appointed US attorney in Maryland, to investigate the matter.

On Thursday, Biden reiterated that he and his attorneys are fully cooperating. The president said he will speak about the issue more, "God willing," soon.

Congressional Republicans had called on Garland to name a special counsel, just as he did over the classified documents found at former president Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

Information about the latest discovery came a few days after special counsel to the president Richard Sauber revealed that Biden's lawyers discovered a batch of 10 classified documents in a "locked closet" on Nov 2, while cleaning out an office formerly used by the president at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington DC. The discovery was only made public on Monday.

In appointing Hur, Garland said:

"The extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel for this matter. This appointment underscores for the public the department's commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law."

Hur will take over from John Lausch, the top Justice Department prosecutor in Chicago, also a Trump-appointed attorney.

Hur said in a statement: "I will conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment. I intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service."

The White House found out that Garland had appointed a special counsel when it was announced during a news conference Thursday afternoon, said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

Following the appointment of Hur, Sauber said: As the president said, he takes classified information and materials seriously, and as we have said, we have cooperated from the moment we informed the archives that a small number of documents were found, and we will continue to cooperate.

"We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake," he said.

Garland said that on Nov 4, the archives informed the Justice Department about the first batch of classified documents. On Nov 9, the FBI assessed whether they had been mishandled.

On Nov 14, Lausch was appointed to lead an investigation about the documents. On Dec 20, the documents in the garage were found. On Jan 5, Lausch advised Garland that appointing a special counsel was warranted.

Biden said earlier this week that he didn't know what was in the first documents found.

Sauber said that following the discovery, Biden's attorneys immediately alerted the White House counsel's office, which then contacted the National Archives and Records Administration, which picked up the documents the next day.

The first discovery prompted Biden's team to search other addresses. Garland said Biden's lawyers told the Justice Department about the discovery of more classified material at his home Thursday.

Biden created the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which has headquarters at the University of Pennsylvania, and would use it occasionally from 2017 until he launched his 2020 presidential campaign in 2019.

The appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden came shortly after Jack Smith was appointed special counsel for the criminal investigation into Trump, who had 300 documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Dozens of documents marked classified were found at Trump's Florida estate in August. The FBI carried out a raid only after attempts to recover them were rebuffed.

Biden lambasted Trump's mishandling of those highly classified documents as "irresponsible" in a September interview with CBS' 60 Minutes.

Ohio Representative Mike Turner, the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, urged Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to conduct a review into the documents Biden had.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, told reporters Thursday: "I think Congress has to investigate this.

"They knew this has happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it a secret from the American public?" McCarthy said. "He goes on 60 Minutes, criticizes President Trump, even knowing what he has done, and he wasn't president at the time?"

Democratic Georgia Representative Hank Johnson said he isn't "ruling out" foul play in the discovery of classified documents found in Biden's possession, suggesting they could have been planted.

"Things can be planted in places and then discovered conveniently. That may be what has occurred here. I'm not ruling that out. But I'm open in terms of the investigation needs to be investigated," he told Fox News on Thursday.