President Joe Biden is blaming the discovery of classified documents from his time as vice president and senator on former staffers who packed up his old offices.
"One of the things that happened is that what was not done well is, as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn't do the kind of job that should have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that's there," Biden said Wednesday in an interview with Judy Woodruff on "PBS NewsHour" in DeForest, Wisconsin, where Biden traveled to talk about the economy.
Biden didn't specify whether the packing job was from after he left the Senate in 2009 or when his term as vice president ended in 2017.
Classified documents from Biden's time as a senator and as Barack Obama's vice president were found at Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at an office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.
Attorney General Merrick Garland named Robert Hor as special counsel to lead the investigation into the documents. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., has also pledged to hold hearings on alleged influence peddling by the Biden family. Biden said he's not concerned about any upcoming House investigations.
"The public is not going to pay attention to that," he said. "They want these guys to do something. If the only thing they're going to do is make up things about my family, it's not going to go very far."
The first thing Biden said after Woodruff asked about the classified documents was: "They informed me not to speak on this issue in any way that would prejudice the investigation that's going on." He did not say who told him not to speak about it.
Biden made a bit of a rambling statement regarding his cooperation with the investigation and the types of documents discovered, which he said were from his early days as a U.S. senator.
"I'm not at liberty, and I'm not even sure, I may voluntarily, no one has had to threaten to do anything, voluntarily open every single aperture I have, with the house, offices, everything for them to come and look and spend hours searching my home … invited them," Biden said. "And the best to my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things that are from 1974. Stray papers. Maybe something else, I don't know."
Woodruff asked about Biden's interview with "60 Minutes" in September in which he criticized former President Donald Trump's possession of classified documents as "irresponsible," and why Biden's possession of such documents was not irresponsible.
"What I was talking about was what was laid out, all these documents were top-secret, code words and all the rest," Biden said.
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