Biden Called Trump 'Irresponsible', Now He's 'Surprised' to Learn He Took Classified Docs Too

President Joe Biden is deflecting the news that potentially classified government records were found by his attorneys at his former office space, saying he was "surprised" to hear of it.

Biden was asked about the issue after the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee requested that the U.S. intelligence community conduct a "damage assessment" of the documents.

Rep. Mike Turner said Biden's retention of the documents put him in "potential violation of laws protecting national security, including the Espionage Act and Presidential Records Act.”

“Those entrusted with access to classified information have a duty and an obligation to protect it,” said Turner in a letter to Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. “This issue demands a full and thorough review.”

Biden said he wasn't familiar with the material. "I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office. But I don't know what's in the documents," he said.

The revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records could be a political headache for the president who called former President Donald Trump's decision to keep hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida "irresponsible."

The new GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said, "I am not going to be quick to judge, I just know he said it was very irresponsible for President Trump to take classified documents to his personal residence and have them in an unsecured location an and it appears he did the same thing."

Trump weighed in Monday on his social media site, asking, "When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?"

In addition to demanding an intelligence assessment, Republicans also want to know why the fact that the classified documents were found was not revealed before last year's midterm congressional elections.

The critical documents in question were reportedly discovered Nov. 2, 2022, before the midterms and the revelation might have had an impact on the outcome, but the news was withheld until now.

And Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, said the American public deserved to know earlier about the classified documents. “They knew about this a week before the election, maybe the American people should have known that,” Jordan told reporters. “They certainly knew about the raid on Mar-a-Lago 91 days before this election, but nice if on November 2, the country would have known that there were classified documents at the Biden Center.”

Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for a briefing on the documents. “Our system of classification exists in order to protect our most important national security secrets, and we expect to be briefed on what happened both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden office as part of our constitutional oversight obligations," he said.