Congressional leaders in the House and Senate have been given access to the classified documents recovered from the homes of former president Donald Trump, President Biden and former vice president Mike Pence, according to two people familiar with the information who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
The classified documents were shared last week with the “Gang of Eight,” a bipartisan group of congressional leaders who typically receive briefings on classified intelligence. The documents were shared after months of pressure on the Biden administration from Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, respectively.
Punchbowl News first reported the development Tuesday morning.
The FBI removed a trove of more than 100 classified documents during a search in August of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Over several months in the winter, classified documents were also found in Biden’s home in Delaware. In January, the FBI retrieved classified documents from Pence’s home.
The Justice Department appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to investigate Trump’s handling of classified materials, and another special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to review Biden’s case. Federal investigators have reportedly since gathered new evidence of possible obstruction by Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declined to respond to questions about release of the classified documents to Congress, saying that the investigation was under the purview of the Justice Department.
In December, Warner told Punchbowl News that Smith had expressed “some concerns” over sharing classified documents with Congress, but Warner pointed out that the Justice Department had been willing to brief the lawmakers in previous months. Warner and Rubio have argued for months that the Justice Department’s refusal to share the classified documents with them was hampering Congress’s responsibility to conduct oversight of the intelligence community.
In January, the two senators made a rare joint appearance on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” to voice their frustration.
“The Justice Department has had the Trump documents, the Biden documents about three months. Our job is not to figure out if somebody mishandled those, but our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise,” Warner said then. “Now that you’ve got the special counsel, the notion that we’re going to be left in limbo and we cannot do our job — that just cannot stand.”
Rubio added that the documents were probably ones congressional leaders had access to.
“I don’t know how congressional oversight on the documents … in any way impedes an investigation,” he said.
In February, Warner and Rubio met with Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to discuss the documents, a briefing they afterward described as unsatisfactory.
“While today’s meeting helped shed some light on these issues, it left much to be desired and we will continue to press for full answers to our questions in accordance with our constitutional oversight obligations,” the senators said in a joint statement in February.
The Gang of Eight includes House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Warner and Rubio. Turner and Himes are the chairman and ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively.
