President Joe Biden’s lawyers found some classified documents in his private office last year before they were transferred to the National Archives, the White House said in a statement Monday.
The documents date back to Biden’s time as vice president and were found in a locked cabinet at a Washington think tank in November. Biden used the office for several years from 2017 to 2020, the special counsel appointed to investigate the matter said in a statement. The president’s personal lawyer told the National Archives, which is tasked with maintaining government documents, the same day the file was discovered and turned over a day later.
It was unclear what type of information was contained in the file, but the White House said the Justice Department would review the episode. The Biden administration added that it was “cooperating” with the DOJ.
CBS News was the first to report the discovery.
Former President Donald Trump, who is under criminal investigation for removing classified documents from the White House, immediately dismissed the news. But Trump failed to note that he had rebuffed several attempts to return the files when the National Archives demanded it. The lawyers eventually turned over the box of documents, but investigatorsver-critical-off, that he had more of them at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida.
“When is the FBI going to raid many of Joe Biden’s homes, maybe even the White House?” Trump wrote on the social network Truth Social. “This document is definitely not classified.”
Richard Sauber, the special counsel who reviewed Biden’s files, suggested Monday that the matter was different, saying the documents found by the president’s lawyers “were not the subject of a previous request or inquiry for the archives.”
“Since the discovery, the president’s personal attorney has been cooperating with the archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that the Obama-Biden administration documents are consistent with the archives,” Sauber said in a statement.