Former prosecutor and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy said Thursday in a new piece that the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland were "grossly negligent" in allowing lawyers without the proper security clearances to search President Joe Biden's residences for more classified documents unsupervised by any federal agency.  

McCarthy argued that because it is a serious offense to have classified documents outside of the National Archives and in an unsecured location, the searches should have been conducted by those with the appropriate clearances to view "top secret" classified documents, the likes of which had reportedly already been found at the Penn Biden Center.

The previous documents found constituted "probably cause" that other documents would be found in other locations, particularly since the Penn Biden Center documents had to have been housed elsewhere until that office opened in 2018.

McCarthy said it was “essential for Garland to ensure that the classified evidence was acquired by government agents with appropriate clearances” because “only such agents could ensure that the evidence was preserved for investigative purposes, and that national security was thus protected.”

Search should have been conducted by law enforcement

“There would have been no problem with permitting Biden’s aides to be present and participate. But the search still should have been conducted principally by law enforcement,” McCarthy said.

In his view, nothing about the documents has been handled correctly from the beginning.

First of all, the initial document find was reported to officials in the Biden White House, not to law enforcement as McCarthy states should have happened.

After officials in the White House conferred about what to do, they reported the find to the National Archives (NARA), which is still not law enforcement, he noted.

It was the NARA Inspector General who notified law enforcement at the DOJ, and the DOJ didn't report it to the FBI until the day after the midterm elections. How convenient.

Very bad decisions

In light of all this, the FBI still decided not to supervise aides who didn't have security clearances to view classified materials to search the rest of Biden's properties for additional documents, which were found in at least three separate locations as a result of the search.

There's a reason why classified documents are classified, and why it's against the law to let them sit in a person's garage for five years.

Mind you, in the garage of the house where his son the crack addict lived, and where he brought his very shady associates by his own admission.

Who knows who might have seen those documents in Biden's garage during that time?

It's obvious that nobody in the Biden administration cares about this in the least, which is a very different reaction than the one they had when documents were found at the residence of former President Donald Trump last year.