U.S. President Joe Biden returns alone to the White House after accompanying first lady Jill Biden as she underwent Mohs surgery to remove cancerous skin lesions, in Washington, U.S., January 11, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Classified government documents from the Obama administration were present in a cupboard space within the garage of President Joe Biden’s Delaware home, Biden said Thursday.
The disclosure of that latest discovery comes three days after Biden’s special counsel Richard Sauber confirmed media reports that attorneys for the president found a primary batch of classified documents from the Biden administration on Nov. 2 in an office that Biden had used as a personal citizen in a Washington think tank.
Sauber issued a press release earlier Thursday detailing how and where the second batch of documents were found. Soon afterward, Biden talked in regards to the discovery to reporters.
“As I said earlier this week, and by the way in which, my Corvette is in a locked garage, so it isn’t like they’re sitting out on the road,” Biden said, referring to the documents.
“People know I take classified documents and classified materials seriously,” Biden said. “I also said we’re cooperating, fully cooperated with the Justice Department’s review.”
The president said the DOJ was immediately notified in regards to the latest discovery, “and we will see how all this unfolds.”
Biden and Sauber’s comments on Thursday didn’t say what day the newest bunch of documents were found. Nor did they address why the White House didn’t reveal how and when the primary batch of documents were found until two months after that happened.
“I feel Congress has to analyze this,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said after Biden spoke.
Former President Donald Trump, who’s under criminal investigation for retaining classified government documents after he left office in early 2021, has suggested the DOJ kept quiet in regards to the discovery of the Biden documents so as to not affect the midterm congressional elections on Nov. 3.
By law, presidents and vice presidents must turn over government records to the National Archives and Records Administration once they leave office. Trump had a whole lot of classified documents and other government records at his residence at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, which the FBI raided in November as a part of the criminal probe.
The DOJ and the National Archives are investigating how and why Biden retained the documents after he accomplished two terms as vice chairman to President Barack Obama in January 2017.
Sauber, in his statement Thursday, said that some unspoken period of time after lawyers for the president found those documents in November on the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, attorneys searched Biden’s residences in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Those locations were ones “where files from his Vice-Presidential office may need been shipped in the midst of the 2017 transition,” when Trump took office, Sauber said.
“The lawyers accomplished that review last night,” Sauber said.
“Throughout the review, the lawyers discovered amongst personal and political papers a small variety of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings,” Sauber said.
The lawyer added that each one but certainly one of those documents were present in a cupboard space within the garage of Biden’s home.
The opposite document, which was a single page, “was discovered amongst stored materials in an adjoining room,” Sauber said. “No documents were present in the Rehoboth Beach residence.”
The lawyer said that the DOJ was “immediately notified” of the invention of the documents in Wilmington, just as had been the case when the primary batch of documents was found on the Penn Biden Center.
