Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, met with National Archives general counsel Gary Stern on Jan. 31 for a three-hour transcribed interview during which Stern said he was blocked from issuing a press release on the Biden document scandal, stating only the Department of Justice (DOJ) or White House could have blocked the National Archives. Stern told Fox News host Sean Hannity there was a “double standard” with how his department handled Trump and Biden. “If you go on the National Archives website, there's pages and pages of press releases and information about the FBI's raid into Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump's possession of classified documents, but ... there wasn't any press release or anything on the website about Joe Biden,” Stern said. Comer said he asked Stern, who is a career member of the Senior Executive Service and has been the General Counsel of NARA since 1998, why there were no press releases on Biden, to which Stern replied NARA had prepared press releases, but was “ordered” not to publish them. When pressed on who issued the order, Stern said he could not reveal that information, but noted, “There are only two people who could have given” the orders — the DOJ or the White House. “So it shows right there that this Department of Justice and this White House is interfering with this and treating Donald Trump very differently than they're treating Joe Biden,” Comer said. As revelations of more classified documents illegally stored by Biden continue to surface, Republicans have grown vocal in their opposition to a vast disparity in treatment between Biden and Trump. “There’s always been a double standard,” Rep. Steve Scalise wrote on Twitter on Jan. 12. “FBI, where’s the raid of Biden’s garage?” Since then, the FBI has conducted several searches of residences owned by Biden, finding sensitive documents from the time he served as vice president and as a senator. A recent report from CBS News confirmed that the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center office back in November 2022, a fact which would still remain secret had the information not been provided by an individual who leaked the information to CBS. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) told Newsmax that the numerous reports of classified documents illegally stored by Biden in several locations prove that they were not just boxes carried out when Biden vacated his positions at the senate and White House. "These were specifically collected and used in the Biden family's criminal activity that we know existed," Fitzgerald said.A high-ranking congressional Republican says a lawyer for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was blocked from commenting on the discovery of classified documents found in multiple homes owned by President Joe Biden despite numerous public statements on former President Donald Trump’s document discovery.
