The American people deserve more than the White House has revealed regarding Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents after his term as vice president ended in 2017, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Wednesday.
"I think America needs to know more," Wenstrup told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "Look, if he has a great respect for classified documents, how did they get out? And documents are marked classified. It's not like you have to look at page 10 to see if something is classified, or an index in the back. It says very much in the front 'classified,' 'top secret,' 'for your information,' only those types of things."
Biden said Tuesday he was surprised by the discovery of documents in a locked closet of an office he used at the Penn Biden Center from 2017 until shortly before he began his presidential campaign in 2020.
The White House has not expanded on the discovery.
"This is an ongoing process under review of the Department of Justice, so we are going to be limited in what we can say here," White House press secretary Karine Jen-Pierre told reporters Wednesday.
"We will provide further details when it's appropriate."
Wenstrup said a more detailed explanation is needed, especially after a "60 Minutes" interview in September in which Biden said his first response upon seeing a photo of top-secret documents seized by the FBI in a raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate was, "How that could possibly happen? How anyone can be that irresponsible?"
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, the lead Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, on which Wenstrup also serves, requested a damage risk assessment regarding the Biden documents from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. Wenstrup said House Republicans made a similar request after the raid on Trump's estate in August but did not get a response.
He is hoping that will change now that the request is coming from someone who likely will be the committee's chair.
"Our immediate reaction [to the Trump raid] was if you went to this extent to do this raid, tell us what the national security risk was that allowed it to be that massive and that much of an event, compared to what has happened with Joe Biden's classified documents," Wenstrup said. "It's just more discreet and, 'Oh, here you go.'"
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