Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee, acknowledged Monday that he intends to work with House Democrats on establishing reform measures for how classified documents can be handled by lawmakers in the future — particularly among presidents and vice presidents.
"We have to reform the way that documents are boxed up when they leave the president and vice president's office," said Comer, while speaking at a National Press Club event.
Three prominent politicians — former President Donald Trump, current President Joe Biden, and former Vice President Mike Pence — have all been in possession of classified government documents in their homes or personal offices.
According to U.S. law, only presidents possess the powers of declassification with classified materials, provided they did it during their tenure as commander in chief.
Pence didn't have the clearance to declassify documents.
The same goes for Biden, relative to the batches of government documents that have already been discovered at his Delaware home or a Washington D.C. based office (the Penn Biden Center) — since it covered the time periods for when Biden was either a U.S. senator or vice president to President Barack Obama.
Trump, however, had the power to declassify his documents that were previously stored at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — assuming he did so before leaving the White House in January, 2021.
The Oversight Committee has authority over the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Comer said it should be plausible for he and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to come up with a bipartisan solution for handling classified materials in the future.
"Somebody needs to oversee all the documents that are going into boxes to make sure they're not classified and if there's a problem, then they need to iron it out before that document is put into that box and loaded on the truck," said Comer.
"There's no hurry on this right now, this just needs to happen prior to this administration going out of office and the next administration coming in," added Comer.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed the chamber's interest in approving a bipartisan policy for handling classified documents.
"We've got a problem in terms of both classification levels, how senior elected officials when they leave government, how they handle documents, we've had too many examples of this," said Warner on Sunday, while appearing on CBS' "Face The Nation" program.
Earlier this month, Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned special counsels to the documents cases involving Trump (Jack Smith) and Biden (Robert Hur).
In a Monday letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the Department of Justice denied the House panel access to all Biden communications involving the handling of classified materials.
"Your letter also requests non-public information that is central to the ongoing Special Counsel investigation," assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte wrote in the letter, according to Politico.
Uriarte continued: "The Department's longstanding policy is to maintain the confidentiality of such information regarding open matters."
"Disclosures to Congress about active investigations risk jeopardizing those investigations and creating the appearance that Congress may be exerting improper political pressure or attempting to influence Department decisions in certain cases," added Uriarte.
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