John Lausch: The Trump-era U.S. attorney handling the Biden classified docs saga
Jerry Dunleavy
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Attorney General Merrick Garland selected a Trump-appointed holdover to handle the Justice Department’s investigation into President Joe Biden improperly keeping classified documents in his office at the Biden Penn Center.
Garland picked U.S. Attorney John Lausch to handle the Biden classified documents saga after the records were allegedly found by the president’s attorneys at the D.C.-based think tank in November 2022.
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Lausch is one of only two Trump-appointed federal prosecutors kept on by Biden — the other is David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, who is investigating Biden’s son Hunter.
Before getting picked by Trump, Lausch had been a partner at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm, and prior to that, he had been an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois from 1999 to 2010. He went to college at Harvard and law school at Northwestern, then he clerked for Reagan-appointed Judge Michael Kanne of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
The attorney general has reportedly asked Lausch to look into how the classified records made their way to Biden’s office and to determine if more investigation is needed, including the appointment of a special counsel.
Biden had initially asked nearly every U.S. attorney to resign in February 2021, but the two Democratic senators from Illinois — Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth — urged Biden not to terminate Lausch. The Illinois Democrats had also played a key role in convincing Trump to nominate Lausch to the position in 2017. They got Biden to reconsider.
“We are disappointed with the decision to terminate U.S. Attorney Lausch without consulting us,” Durbin and Duckworth said in February 2021, adding, “While the President has the right to remove U.S. attorneys, there is precedent for U.S. attorneys in the Northern District of Illinois to remain in office to conclude sensitive investigations.”
The president relented, and Lausch was kept on.
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Biden’s White House special counsel Richard Sauber said Monday that “a small number of documents with classified markings,” along with an unspecified number of “what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records,” had been “discovered” by Biden’s personal attorneys as they packed “files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space.”
Sauber said Biden had “periodically used this space from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 campaign.” Biden declared his candidacy in late April 2019. Sauber said the discovery was made on Nov. 2, 2022, and that the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives the same day.