U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, R-Port Barre, weighed in Tuesday on classified documents discovered in President Biden’s residence, as well as hundreds of suspicious activity reports issued by banks for financial transactions involving the Biden family.

“Documents for classified briefings are very heavily controlled, yet documents that are top secret at one time, might not be top secret at all the following month,” Higgins said in addressing the Rotary Club of Jennings. “We had top secret briefings in October 2021 that Russia was staging to renew its invasion of Ukraine. All the signs were there, so it was no big secret if you looked at that data that Russian was looking to renew its invasion of Ukraine.”

Some documents marked as top secret are no longer valid and end up in a notebook somewhere over time, he said.

“But the President of the United States has 100 percent authority over determining what is classified and what is not classified from his briefing,” he said, noting there is no specific process or law for the president to declare something unclassified.

The vice president does not have that authority, he said.

There are “hundreds and hundreds” of classified documents that are reviewed and discussed weekly in a “hard copy” format for security purposes, he said.

“They are in folders marked top secret, or classified and if the president or vice president makes personal notes on a classified document, it’s generally accepted that they go in a different box,” he said. “You’ve got the president’s notes on that document and that document, according to what is appropriate, is deemed unclassified depending on the subject matter.”

He said it is not uncommon for presidents to have those documents moved to their homes by other people when they leave the White House. The documents are often used to help the former president write his memoirs and end up in the Presidential Library.

While classified materials were also found in a storage room of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate during an FBI raid, Higgins said the two cases are a little different.

The main difference between the classified documents found at Biden’s and Trump’s residences is that Biden’s attorneys notified the National Archives following the discovery last November. Trump held on to the more than 100 classified documents until authorities searched the residence.

Higgins, who has been to Mar-a-Lago several times, said it is a fortress with cameras everywhere.

“The things that he (Trump) had boxed up and moved from the White House and straight to Mar-a-Lago and put into a secure room were inspected and authorized as properly secured by the FBI and National Archives in the summer before the FBI raid,” he said. “They were not in a garage by a Corvette. They were in a billionaire’s secured room.”

“I am not trying to condemn President Biden, because he didn’t carry boxes of stuff out to the U-Haul when he left the vice president’s residence,” he continued. “Somebody moved that stuff around and some of his stuff ended up in his house and at the Think Tank that they had established with the University of Pennsylvania.”

Higgins said while he is staying away from judgment about the Biden incident until investigations are complete, he said there is some “real ugly criminal stuff” regarding money laundering out of Ukraine and China that is being looked into.

Higgins said he is skeptical because the Bidens had 150 suspicious activity reports issued by several banks regarding financial transactions by members of the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and the president’s brother.

“Out of four or five different banks they were moving large sums of money from overseas to a point it triggered 150 suspicious activity reports,” he said.

Higgins said historically Congress has had access to suspicious activity reports through treasury officials, but Biden changed the rules and restricted Congress’ access to those reports on his second day in office.

Two of the 150 were leaked to the media, but 148 others have not been released, he said.

“We don’t know if anything in those suspicious activity reports relate to the classified documents because why do you have attorneys going through your stuff … what prompted that?”

Higgins, along with other members of the Republican Oversight Committee in Congress, have been trying to get the reports, which he said are a “pure investigative tool,” released by the Treasury Department to avoid a long legal battle.

If treasury officials continue to resist leaders’ demands to have access to suspicious activities reports, then legal battles will end up in the Supreme Court which will make the final ruling, he said.

“We’re going to see these things and if they tie together with the documents, that’s not good,” he said. “That would be bad for our Republic, because you don’t want a president involved in that stuff.”