White House says classified documents found in Biden’s garage as president says he’s ‘cooperating fully’
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President Joe Biden’s personal attorneys discovered additional classified documents stored among papers and items in the garage of president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home, the White House has said.
Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber said on Thursday that Mr Biden’s attorneys have completed a search of Mr Biden’s two Delaware residences – his primary home in the state’s capital and a vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware – in consultation with the Justice Department.
The latest search follows the 2 November discovery of Obama-era records at a think tank office used by Mr Biden during his time away from government service.
Mr Sauber said the search was completed on Wednesday night, and involved Mr Biden’s homes because they were “the other locations where files from his Vice-Presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition”.
He added that Mr Biden’s attorneys discovered “a small number of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings” in “storage space in the President’s Wilmington residence garage,” along with a single one-page document found “among stored materials in an adjacent room”.
Mr Biden addressed the situation directly in brief remarks on Thursday.
“People know I take classified material seriously. I also said we’re cooperating fully and completely with the Justice Department’s review,” Mr Biden said from the White House as he spoke on the latest inflation figures.
No documents were found in Mr Biden’s Rehoboth Beach property, which Fox Business Network reported cost him and first lady Jill Biden approximately $2.74m when they purchased it in 2017.
Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.
“As we stated previously, we are fully cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in possession of the Archives,” he said, adding later that the Department of Justice was “immediately notified” about the records by Mr Biden’s lawyers, who arranged for the department to take possession of the records.
He said the White House would continue to cooperate with the ongoing DOJ review.
The discovery of records with classification markings at the president’s home and his former office comes as a Department of Justice special prosecutor, Jack Smith, is considering whether to seek criminal charges against Mr Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, for allegedly hoarding national defence information at his Palm Beach, Florida mansion after the end of his term, refusing to return it when asked, and obstructing a probe into whether he’d returned all the government-owned documents he had been required to return when he left office in January 2021.
Republicans have called for Mr Garland to name a second special counsel to probe the discovery of documents at locations linked to Mr Biden, though there is no indication that the department has opened a criminal investigation into the matter.
Mr Garland is set to deliver remarks at 1.15 PM on Thursday.
Source: independent.co.uk