US President Joe Biden listens during a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, US, January 13, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst Reuters
Additional classified government documents from the Obama administration were found at President Joe Biden’s Delaware home this week, the White House confirmed on Saturday.
In a statement, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the President, said a total of six pages of classified documents were found at Biden’s Wilmington home. The first document was identified Wednesday by Biden’s personal attorney and turned over, and five additional documents were discovered later that week, Sauber said.
“The DOJ officials and I immediately took them down,” he said in the statement.
Sauber said the President’s lawyers had acted “immediately and voluntarily” to provide the documents to the Department of Justice.
Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, said in a statement Saturday that the President’s personal attorney is working to balance public transparency and the necessary restrictions to “protect the integrity of the investigation.”
Bauer said the lawyers did not have security clearances, meaning they did not know the exact number of documents or their contents. He said that when lawyers found documents with confidential markings, they stopped, notified the government, and did not review them.
“Adhering to this process means that any disclosure of documents cannot be conclusive until the government has conducted its own investigation, including taking any documents and reviewing any environmental material for further review and context,” Bauer said.
The disclosure of the latest findings comes a few days after Sauber confirmed media reports that the president’s lawyers discovered a trove of classified documents from the Biden administration on November 2 in the office Biden used as a private citizen at the Washington think tank.
That’s nearly three months after FBI agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida home and seized more than 100 classified government documents and hundreds of other records that federal prosecutors say belong to the US government.
Trump is the focus of a criminal investigation by the DOJ to remove the records from the White House in January 2021.
Sauber announced Thursday that a second batch of documents had been found at Biden’s Delaware home. He issued a statement detailing how and where the second batch of documents was found and said a “small number” of notes with classified markings were found in the garage.
By law, government records must be turned over to the National Archives when the president or an official in the administration leaves office.
Shortly after the second discovery, Biden spoke about the documents to reporters.
“As I said this week, and, my Corvette is in a locked garage, so it’s not like she’s sitting on the street,” Biden said, pointing to the document.
“People know I take classified documents and classified material very seriously,” Biden said. “I also said we are cooperating, cooperating with the Department of Justice review.”
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