WATCH: Westwood says FBI will use ‘ongoing investigations’ to skirt Biden documents questions
Julia Johnson
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The Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood predicted on Tuesday that the FBI will use “the specter of an ongoing investigation” to avoid providing information about the classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s home and office.
“If the liberal-leaning leadership of the Justice Department does not want some of this information that could be damaging about Biden to get out. They have the specter of an ongoing investigation to hide behind,” she said on Fox Business Tonight.
“Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats had been pestering the Justice Department for information about what kind of records Trump had in his home. The Justice Department’s special counsel Jack Smith has been stymieing that committee. So, it’s very possible that Republicans could find it more difficult to get information from the Justice Department about the investigation,” Westwood explained.
However, she noted that the department didn’t seem to have any issue with cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee despite several ongoing investigations. Westwood said the department likely won’t be as open with the committees investigating the classified documents.
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She further claimed that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) may run into more obstacles than his colleague House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) in investigating.
According to Westwood, Comer’s investigation “is focusing more on the substance of the case. What was in the documents that were found at Joe Biden’s residence? Who searched for them? What were their job titles? What were their security clearances?” whereas Jordan’s investigation “is not so much about Biden’s actual violation but how the Justice Department itself handled that.”
Since “that is not a subject of criminal investigation, that should be straightforward information about the decisions that the FBI made and who was briefed and when,” she added.
“The Justice Department could have a tougher time stonewalling Jim Jordan’s investigation because it is not about what’s at the heart of the ongoing criminal probe,” Westwood continued.
Further, she pointed out the discrepancies between the handling of both former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandled documents and Biden’s. “Why did FBI agents raid the former president’s home in Mar-a-Lago?” she asked, noting that “Trump’s lawyers at the time were actively cooperating with Justice Department to get the documents back to the National Archives.”
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“In Biden’s case, why they decided to defer to Biden’s personal lawyers and allow them to search the home, and after the first two times that it turned out that Biden’s private office and residence contained classified information, they didn’t suspect that potentially, Biden had been careless with classified information and this might require a third party to investigate,” she said. “At no point have they searched Biden’s residences or private offices.”
“The question,” she continued, “is why that step was deemed necessary for Trump when in both cases, lawyers were actively cooperating with the National Archives.”