WATCH LIVE: White House holds press conference as top Democrats slam Biden over documents

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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will hold a press briefing on Monday following several senior Democratic officials who criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents after leaving office on Sunday. of vice president and his disappointment that the White House has not been more open with the public. .

The event is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. ET. Look in the player above.

Lawmakers who might have anticipated questions focused on the debt limit or aid to Ukraine when they were booked last week for Sunday news broadcasts found themselves quizzed on the latest development of the week. -end in documentary drama that put Biden’s presidency on the defensive: During a Friday search of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, the FBI found additional documents with classified marks and took possession of some of his handwritten notes, the president’s attorney said Saturday.

Biden should be “embarrassed by the situation,” said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, adding that the president had ceded moral ground on an issue that once entangled former President Donald. Trump. Special advocates appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland are investigating both cases.

“Yes of course. Let’s be honest about it. When this information is found, it diminishes the stature of anyone who has it because it’s not supposed to happen. … The chosen one bears the ultimate responsibility,” said Durbin.

Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., said Biden “should have a lot of regrets. … You might as well say, ‘Look, this is irresponsible.’ The president told reporters on Thursday that he had “no regrets” about how and when the public learned of the documents and that there was “nothing there.”

Despite their criticism, Biden’s fellow Democrats defended what they said was his cooperation with the Justice Department as the search for additional classified documents unfolds. They compared it to Trump’s resistance to efforts to retrieve hundreds of documents after leaving office.

“It’s outrageous that either happened,” Durbin said. “But the reaction of the former president and the current president couldn’t be more contrasting.”

Biden voluntarily allowed the FBI into his home on Friday, but the lack of a warrant did not mitigate the extraordinary nature of the search. It added to Biden’s embarrassment that began earlier in January with the revelation that the president’s lawyers had found a “small number” of classified documents in a former Penn Biden Center office in Washington shortly before the Nov. 8 election. .

The White House revealed that Biden’s team had found classified documents and official documents on three other occasions in the past few months during follow-up searches on December 20 in the garage of his Wilmington home and on December 11 and 12. January in his personal library.

The findings have become a political liability as Biden prepares to launch his 2024 re-election bid, and they have undermined his efforts to project an image of propriety to the American public after the tumultuous presidency of his predecessor, Trump.

Manchin excoriated the two men for their handling of sensitive security documents. “It’s just hard to believe that in the United States of America we have a former president and a current president who are basically in the same situation,” he said. “How can this happen?”

At the same time, Democrats worried that Biden’s struggles had created an opening for newly empowered House Republicans.

“We have to be concerned, since this new group that has taken over the House of Representatives has promised us endless investigations, confrontations, impeachments and chaos, which is going to happen,” Durbin said.

The new chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said he took Biden “at his word when the first set of documents were found. … But now it’s gone from just irresponsible to downright scary.

The Justice Department said Trump took hundreds of classified marked documents with him when he left the White House in early 2021 and resisted months of requests to return them to the government. Biden voluntarily handed over the documents when found. But the issue hangs with Biden and his aides, who said they acted quickly and appropriately when the documents were discovered, and are working to be as transparent as possible.

Durbin appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Manchin was on CNN and NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and Comer was interviewed on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

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