House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner on Sunday said he has "a grave concern" after seeing some of the documents from the cache held by President Joe Biden and the ones under the custody of former President Donald Trump, as the classified materials should not have been held in unsecured places.
"Both of them included details of national security issues that should not have been outside of a controlled environment," the Ohio Republican said on CNN's "State of the Union."
Turner also disagreed with statements made by former Attorney General Bill Barr, who has said that Trump committed a "very egregious obstruction" by refusing to turn over the documents in his possession to the National Archives.
"We brought in our archivists and had them testify as to what was occurring with the issue of the Trump documents," said Turner. "We released the transcript and the archivists were unaware that they had classified documents. The first cache of documents to the archives was the first time they became aware that there were classified documents involved and they were pursuing presidential records."
But, he added that "within four months of Trump surrendering to them the classified documents, they opened the boxes and were surprised that he even had classified documents. Within four months, Mar-a-Lago was raided. It wasn't this entire time and it certainly was an acceptable time."
Turner said his committee is working on a bipartisan basis to determine if laws need to be changed about the handling of such documents.
"What we heard from the archivist was every administration since Reagan has delivered to them documents that included classified and unclassified documents mixed," said Turner. "Eighty members of Congress have sent documents to libraries where the library subsequently had to notify them, saying that we found classified documents."
Turner added he won't defend the behavior Trump is accused of committing in the indictment against him, but "they're going to have to prove it and it's a legal process that's going to have to go forward."
Meanwhile, the Intelligence Committee will hear testimony from John Durham on Tuesday about the Trump-Russia investigation, and Turner said there are concerns about the government opening an investigation on Trump's 2016 campaign based on "uncorroborated information" taken from Hillary Clinton's campaign.
"How do we make certain this doesn't happen again?" he said. "How do we make certain that we don't have people with a political bias entering into political campaigns and using the authority of the government to have major media and the government take actions that are not based on truth?"
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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