President Joe Biden has been interviewed by the special counsel team investigating how classified documents from his time as vice president ended up at his office and home, the White House said Monday night.
The interview was conducted at the White House on Sunday and Monday and was done voluntarily, the administration added.
“As we have said from the beginning, the President and the White House are cooperating with this investigation, and as it has been appropriate, we have provided relevant updates publicly, being as transparent as we can consistent with protecting and preserving the integrity of the investigation,” Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement.
Interviews of this magnitude with the focus of the investigation would typically signal the inquiry is close to the end. The investigation began last year after documents were found by the president’s attorneys in an office he used after he’d left the Obama administration and before he ran for president.
Biden’s lawyers say they notified the National Archives and Records Administration immediately and handed the documents over.
More documents were later found in the president’s home in Delaware, prompting Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint Robert Hur as special counsel in January to look into the matter. The probe into Biden has taken place almost completely in secret — a stark contrast from the investigation into documents kept by Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, which has played out with very public spats over executive privilege. And unlike Biden, Trump declined to be interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith, a decision that preceded the former president’s indictment on charges stemming from his bid to subvert the 2020 election.
The FBI also conducted searches of the Biden vacation home in Rehoboth, Del., where “some materials and handwritten notes,” were found that appeared to also date back to Biden’s time as vice president, the president’s lawyer Bob Bauer said at the time.
A spokesperson for Hur declined to comment on Biden’s questioning.
While it's rare for criminal investigators to interview sitting presidents, many other recent leaders have sat down with prosecutors conducting sensitive inquiries.
In 2008, then President-elect Barack Obama was interviewed by federal prosecutors and the FBI as part of a probe into efforts by Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to sell the Senate seat Obama was vacating.
Former President George W. Bush was interviewed in 2004 as part of an investigation into the leaked identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
And Bill Clinton was also questioned in several inquiries, most famously in contentious videotaped testimony to a grand jury investigating his statements about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
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