Joe Biden has been accused of hypocrisy for condemning his Republican predecessor Donald Trump for keeping official documents after leaving the White House in 2020 that he had the authority to declassify.
The House Oversight Committee has launched its own probe into the discovery of classified official documents at a private office used by President Joe Biden.
Republican Kentucky Representative James Comer, who is the new chair of the panel, wrote to White House counsel Stuart Delery on Tuesday, asking him to provide all the documents found at Biden's private office in Pennsylvania by January 23.
"The Committee is concerned that President Biden has compromised sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents," Comer wrote.
The congressman also wrote to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall to ask for copies of the same documents.
Comer told Wall that the delay in reporting the the discovery of the papers at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement by Biden's own lawyers, more than two months earlier on November 2, 2022, "raises questions about political bias at the agency."
US TV news media reported on Monday that around 10 classified documents had been discovered by Biden's own lawyers at the center, part of the University of Pennsylvania, which Biden used as a personal office from 2017 to 2020.
"The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings," Biden's special legal counsel Richard Sauber said on Monday.
Comer has been a thorn in Biden's side before, launching a Republican-led probe into the Biden family's alleged international network of corruption in November last year.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who is currently accompanying Biden on his trip to a regional summit in Mexico, has ordered a Department of Justice "review" of the documents.
Garland also ordered last August's FBI raid on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida to seize documents which the former president took with him on leaving the White House in January 2020. The agents denied Trump's lawyers access to the villa and reportedly rifled through his wife Melania's underwear.
The classified papers found at Biden's private office reportedly include intelligence files on Ukraine, Iran and even NATO ally, the UK.
While serving as vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden pressured the Kiev government to sack its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin after he launched a probe into gas company Burisma Holdings, which employed Biden's son Hunter as an executive despite his lack of any qualifications. Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate possible corruption by the Bidens.
The Biden administration has also broken his election promise to return the US to the JCPOA agreement with Iran on the use of peaceful nuclear energy, assuring Iranian emigres there would be no deal while talks were still underway in the Austrian capital Vienna.
And the president has tried to pressure the UK to surrender in its dispute with the European Union over the Northern Ireland Protocol to the UK withdrawal agreement from the bloc, claiming to have a stake in the deal due to his supposed Irish ancestry.
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