Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday.
White House counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had previously said only one page was found there.
The latest revelation is added to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November in his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president.
The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records by the Obama administration is being investigated by a former federal prosecutor, Robert Hur, who was appointed as special counsel Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s personal attorneys, who did not have security clearance, stopped their search after finding the front page Wednesday night. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday while facilitating its recovery by the Justice Department. “While I was transferring it to Justice Department officials with me, an additional five pages with classification marks were discovered among the material it contained, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The Justice Department officials who were with me immediately took possession of them. ..”
Sauber previously said the White House “was confident that a thorough review would show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his attorneys acted promptly upon discovering this error.”
Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of classified records. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial batch of documents in Biden’s office.
On Thursday, when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if Biden could guarantee that no additional classified documents would be found in an additional search, she told reporters: “You have to assume that it has been completed. , Yeah”. Sauber reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with the Hur investigation. Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, said his legal team has “attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with established standards and the limitations necessary to protect the integrity of the investigation.”
Historically, the Department of Justice imposes a high legal standard before filing criminal charges in cases involving the mishandling of classified information, requiring someone to have intended to break the law rather than simply being careless or negligent in doing so. do it.
The main statute governing the unlawful removal and retention of classified documents makes it an offense to “knowingly” remove classified documents and store them in an unauthorized manner. The circumstances involving Biden, at least so far known, differ from a separate investigation into the mishandling of classified documents at the private club and former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence.
In Trump’s case, special counsel Jack Smith is looking into whether anyone tried to obstruct his investigation into the withholding of classified records on the Palm Beach property. Justice Department officials have said Trump’s representatives failed to fully comply with a subpoena seeking the return of classified records, prompting agents to return to the home with a search warrant so they could collect additional materials. .
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