President Joe Biden on Tuesday addressed the discovery of classified documents in a private office used during the Obama administration, saying he was “shocked” by the findings and did not know what the records contained.
“I was briefed on this discovery and was surprised to learn that government records were brought to the office,” he said during a speech in Mexico City. “But I don’t know what’s in the document. My lawyer didn’t advise me to ask what the document was.
The White House announced the discovery of the documents on Monday, saying that in November, Biden’s lawyers found a small collection of Barack Obama-era materials in a locked cabinet at the Penn Biden Center – the Washington think tank that served as his office from 2017 to 2020.
The White House said the Biden administration immediately contacted the National Archives, which maintains government documents, and turned it over a day later.
“People know I take classified documents, classified information very seriously,” Biden said on Tuesday.
A source familiar with the matter told CBS News, which was the first to report on the documents, that there were about 10 records found in total, none of which contained nuclear secrets, one of the sources said.
This is a small part of the 10,000-plus documents found during the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s private home in Florida last summer, more than 100 of which were marked as classified. Richard Sauber, the special counsel who studied Biden’s files, rejected the comparison between the two incidents, saying on Monday that the documents in the think tank’s office “were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the archivist.”
“Since the discovery,” he continued, “the president’s personal attorney has been cooperating with the archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that Obama-Biden administration documents are consistent with the archives.”
That hasn’t stopped Republicans, including Trump, from trumpeting the news.
“When is the FBI going to raid many of Joe Biden’s homes, maybe even the White House?” Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social. “This document is definitely not classified.”