Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that the FBI is “not being forthcoming” about the classified documents found at the homes of President Biden and former President Trump after top lawmakers received a briefing on the matter.
“Well, first off, in the things that we do know, one of things we know is that the FBI is not being forthcoming. They’re not giving us the information. They’re claiming that it’s going to affect the outcome of their investigation, which of course it can’t, because the people who are the targets of their investigation know what are in those documents, and we have the clearance and the ability to look at these documents,” Turner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The top Intel lawmaker said that the briefing didn’t share what was inside the Trump and Biden documents. The panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), appearing with Turner on NBC, said that “neither one of us are satisfied that we got enough information.”
The FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last summer, recovering more than a hundred classified materials dating from Trump’s time at the White House. Classified documents were also recently found in separate discoveries at Biden’s Delaware home and an old office in Washington, D.C. Later, classified materials were found at the home of Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence.
“So, as we go through this process, as they give us the category of the documents and their assessment as to who had access to them, who did not have access to them, we’re beginning to build an understanding,” Turner said.
The Republican called it “unbelievable that administration after administration is apparently sloppy and messy in their use of classified documents” and stressed that the issue needs to be addressed “on a bipartisan basis.”
Turner described a “tension between the FBI and Congress” that he thinks is “going to come to a head over the next couple of years.”
Himes called the documents a “very serious issue” after the briefing.
“Again, we can’t get too into the details. We got a flavor for what was there, and I won’t speak for Mike, but I will tell you, having been given a flavor, this is a very serious issue. This wasn’t stuff that we can say clearly does not matter, it matters,” Himes said, though the lawmakers didn’t specify whether the gravity applied to all three Biden, Trump and Pence cases.