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Attorney General Merrick Garland is ready to make a public statement on Thursday afternoon on the Department of Justice.
The event was scheduled on the identical day that President Joe Biden and his lawyer revealed that a second batch of classified government documents was discovered in a cupboard space within the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del.
The DOJ is investigating the invention of those documents, in addition to of the primary batch of classified records that were found by lawyers for the president in an office that Biden had used at a Washington think tank through the years when he was a personal citizen, from 2017 to 2020.
Garland had assigned John Lausch, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, to handle the probe.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland pronounces that he’s appointing Jack Smith as a special counsel for the investigations of former President Donald Trump, while talking to the news media within the briefing room of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, November 18, 2022.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Lausch is one in every of just two U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Donald Trump to have remained in office under the Biden administration. Lausch was tapped to oversee the investigation of the Biden documents as a way to avoid the looks of a conflict of interest for Garland, who was appointed to his post by Biden.
Garland in November appointed former federal prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee criminal investigations on Trump.
Considered one of those probes is targeted on whether Trump broke federal law by retaining government documents, tons of of which were classified, when he left office, and whether he obstructed justice in resisting efforts by authorities to recuperate those documents.
