The FBI searched President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware on Friday and found six additional documents containing classified signatures and also took several notes, the president’s lawyer said Saturday.
Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, said the search of the entire premises took nearly 13 hours. The documents obtained by the FBI span Biden’s time in the Senate and vice presidency, while the records date back to when he was vice president. The level of classification, and whether it remains classified, was not immediately clear as the Justice Department reviewed the records.
The search comes more than a week after Biden’s lawyers found six classified documents in the president’s home library from his time as vice president, and nearly three months after lawyers discovered several classified records in his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. . A day after Biden declared that he was “not there” about the discovery of the document, which became a political headache for the president and complicated the investigation of the Department of Justice into the former President Donald Trump kept secret documents and official records after he left office. .
“We found some documents that were filed in the wrong place,” Biden told reporters who asked him during a tour about the damage from the storm in California. “We immediately sent it to the Archives and the Department of Justice.”
Biden said he was “cooperating fully and looking forward to a resolution as soon as possible.”
The president and first lady Jill Biden were not at home when they searched. He spends the weekend at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
It remains to be seen whether additional searches by federal officials at other locations are possible. Biden’s personal attorney previously conducted a search of his Rehoboth Beach home and said he found no official documents or confidential records.
Bauer said the FBI asked the White House not to comment on the search before it took place, and that Biden’s personal and White House attorneys were present. The FBI, he added, “has full access to the President’s home, including handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and memorabilia dating back decades.”
The Department of Justice, he added, “took materials considered to be within the scope of the investigation, including six items that include documents with classified marks and surrounding materials, some from the President’s service in the Senate and some from his position as Vice President .”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate possible wrongdoing surrounding the Biden documents.
“From the beginning, the President has been committed to handling this responsibly because he took it very seriously,” White House lawyer Richard Sauber said Saturday. “The President’s counsel and the White House Counsel’s Office will continue to work closely with the DOJ and the Special Counsel to help this process proceed quickly and efficiently.”
The discovery of the Biden documents and the investigation into Trump, which is in the hands of special counsel Jack Smith, are very different. The Justice Department said Trump took hundreds of notes marked classified with him when he left the White House in early 2021 and refused months of requests to return them to the administration. Biden has made a point of cooperating with the DOJ investigation at every turn, though questions about his transparency with the public remain.
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Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, contributed to this report.
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