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Photo by Hisham Ibrahim via Getty Images
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Classified Documents Found in Biden's Former Office and Garage
President Joe Biden said this week that it "surprised" him to learn that his legal team found classified documents inside a locked closet while packing up his former private office in Washington, D.C., last fall.
Frankly, that information stunned many people when CBS News first reported the details on Monday. There was more shock on Wednesday, when NBC News reported that Biden aides had found a second batch of classified documents at a separate location -- later revealed to be the garage of Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware.
The White House said the president's personal attorneys have been cooperating with a Justice Department review of the matter. However, Republicans were quick to ask if Biden would receive the same federal scrutiny as his predecessor, Donald Trump, who is under criminal investigation for how he handled classified records after leaving office.
"When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Jan. 9, making a reference to the FBI’s execution of a court-authorized search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in August.
But as Staff Writer D'Angelo Gore writes, there are key differences between the Biden and Trump situations, including the number of documents involved and how those documents were returned to the National Archives and Records Administration.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in a Jan. 12 press conference that he has appointed Robert Hur, a former federal prosecutor, as special counsel for the investigation of Biden's documents.
For more on this week's jaw-dropping news, read our story, "Classified Documents Found at Former Biden Office, Drawing Comparisons to Trump."
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There’s no official measure of how many people succeed in illegally crossing the border, but authorities use the number of apprehensions to gauge changes in illegal immigration. In a recent article about illegal immigration at the southwest border, Deputy Managing Editor Rob Farley used U.S. Customs and Border Protection data for apprehensions dating to 1925. Read more.
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Under President Joe Biden, consumer prices have risen dramatically. Inflation peaked at 9% for the 12 months ending in June, but it is now slowly coming down. What's the record high? The biggest 12-month increase on record, dating to 1948, occurred in March 1980 and again in April 1980. The Consumer Price Index rose 14.6% annually both months. Read more.
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Kathleen Hall Jamieson -- the co-founder of FactCheck.org and the indefatigable director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center -- is co-author of a new book called "Democracy amid Crises."
The book is the work of the Annenberg IOD Collaborative, which includes 11 scholars from six universities.
The publisher, Oxford University Press, describes the book on its website as a "data-rich analysis of how the four inter-related crises of 2020 -- the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic collapse and K-shaped recovery, the clashes over the legacy of racism and policing, and assaults on the legitimacy of democratic institutions (abetted by conspiracy theories) -- shaped not only the 2020 election, but also the future of our democracy."
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Reader: Has Biden pulled Monoclonal off the market, to be used in hospital for covid 19?
FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: On Jan. 24, 2022, the Food and Drug Administration announced it was no longer authorizing two COVID-19 monoclonal antibody drugs in the U.S., citing evidence that those drugs are “highly unlikely” to work against the omicron variant that was present at that time. Quite simply, the risk outweighed the benefit.
The FDA in a press release explaining its decision said: “This avoids exposing patients to side effects, such as injection site reactions or allergic reactions, which can be potentially serious, from specific treatment agents that are not expected to provide benefit to patients who have been infected with or exposed to the omicron variant.”
In their own statements, the manufacturers of both antibody drugs in question — Eli Lilly and the biotech company Regeneron — said they agreed with the FDA and found the decision appropriate.
At the time, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida misleadingly claimed the FDA’s decision had been made “without a shred of clinical data” to support it. Science Editor Jessica McDonald wrote about that in her article “DeSantis Misleads on Omicron-Resistant COVID-19 Antibody Treatments.”
You can read about other treatments available for COVID-19 in our recently updated article “What treatments are available for COVID-19?”
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Wrapping Up
Here's what else we've got for you this week:
- "Biden and Abbott Twist Their Border Narratives": President Joe Biden, who recently made his first visit as president to the southern border, and Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who greeted Biden in Texas, offered competing versions of who’s to blame for a spike in illegal immigration. But both twisted some facts to fit their partisan narratives.
- "No Evidence for Kari Lake’s Claim that Maricopa County Ballots Lacked Chain of Custody Records": A judge on Dec. 24 dismissed Kari Lake’s claim that there was no chain of custody for 300,000 mail-in ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, during the 2022 election, yet posts on social media continue to spread the baseless claim. Every mail-in ballot in the county had a unique barcode and chain of custody documents to ensure security, election officials said.
Y lo que publicamos en español (English versions are accessible in each story):
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