President Joe Biden’s legal team has discovered a second set of classified documents from his time as vice president at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, the White House said on Thursday. An additional classified document was also found in his personal library.
The statement by Richard Sauber, a special counsel to Biden, came days after the White House said an earlier batch of documents had been discovered in November in the closet of an office at a University of Pennsylvania think tank that Biden had used after leaving the vice presidency.
The discoveries have presented legal and political headaches for Biden as he prepares for an expected 2024 re-election campaign in the upcoming months.
Biden ‘cooperating’
Biden on Thursday acknowledged that a document with classified markings from his time as vice president had also been found in his “personal library” in his Delaware home.
Biden told reporters at the White House that he is “cooperating fully and completely” with a Justice Department investigation into how classified information and government records made their way to his home and the office of his former institute in Washington.
Biden did not say when the latest series of documents were found, only that his lawyers’ review of potential storage locations was completed Wednesday night. Lawyers found the first set on November 2, days before the midterm elections, but only publicly revealed that development on Monday.
Same as Trump? No
There are differences between the revelation that Biden’s legal team found classified documents in his properties and the ongoing Justice Department investigation into former President Donald Trump’s refusal to hand over classified documents taken from the White House.
Trump kept thousands of government records, a few hundred of which were marked as classified, inside his personal residence in Florida for more than a year after departing the White House, and did not return them immediately or willingly despite numerous requests by the National Archives.
When he finally handed over 15 boxes of records in January 2022, the Archives discovered more than 100 were marked as classified. It referred the matter to the Justice Department in the spring and a special counsel has been named to oversee the investigation.
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
