Aide to President Joe Biden found more classified documents from his time as vice president in another location, according to multiple reports.
NBC News first reported Wednesday that presidential aides had sought additional classified material after an initial batch of files were discovered in November, sifting through the locations used by Biden after leaving the Obama administration. It is not clear where the latest documents were found, how many there are or what information they contain.
The report comes just days after the White House said Biden’s personal attorney discovered several confidential files in his private office last year dating back to his tenure as vice president. The document was found in a locked cabinet at a think tank in Washington, DC, which Biden used for several years from 2017 to 2020.
The president’s lawyer informed the National Archives of the findings the same day and turned over the document a day later. The White House said the Justice Department would review the episode, adding it was “cooperating” with the agency.
Biden said after the first report that he was “shocked” when he first learned there were classified files in his former office.
“After I was briefed on the findings, I was shocked to learn that there were government records brought into the office,” Biden told reporters Tuesday. “But I don’t know what’s in the document.”
Republicans have seized on the news, including former President Donald Trump, who is under investigation for fleeing to his Florida home with a box of classified information. However, Trump did not note that he had refused to try to return the documents when the National Archives demanded them, or that investigators found that they had even more at his Mar-a-Lago complex in Palm Beach, Florida.
Richard Sauber, the president’s special counsel, suggested on Monday that the remaining issues differed, saying that the initial batch of documents found by the president’s lawyers “was not the subject of a previous request or inquiry by the archivist.”
“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 this week.