Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more documents with a seal of secrecy at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than was previously known, the White House acknowledged in a statement on Saturday.
White House counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement that a search of Mr. Biden’s private library turned up a total of six pages of documents marked as classified. The White House previously said only one page was found there.
The latest disclosure relates to the discovery of documents found in December in Mr. Biden’s garage and in November in his former offices at the Penn Biden Washington Center from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records by the Obama administration is being investigated by former U.S. Attorney Robert Gurr, who was appointed special counsel Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Sauber said in a statement on Saturday that Mr Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have a security clearance, had called off the search after finding the first page on Wednesday night. Sauber found the remnants of the materials on Thursday when he was assisting with the Department of Justice’s search for them.
“While I was turning it over to the Justice Department officials who were accompanying me, five additional pages of classified information were found among the materials with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “Justice officials with me immediately took possession of them.”
Sauber previously said the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently lost, and the president and his lawyers acted immediately upon discovering this error.”
On Saturday, he reiterated that the White House would cooperate with the Gurr investigation.
The Justice Department has historically set a high legal bar before bringing criminal charges in cases involving the misuse of classified information, requiring that someone intend to break the law, rather than simply being careless or negligent in doing so. The main statute governing the illegal removal and retention of classified documents makes it a crime to “knowingly” remove and retain classified documents in an unauthorized manner.
The circumstances surrounding Mr. Biden, at least so far known, are separate from the separate investigation into the mishandling of classified documents at a private club and former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence.
In the Trump case, special counsel Jack Smith is investigating whether anyone tried to interfere with their investigation into the storage of classified documents at the Palm Beach estate. Justice Department officials said Trump officials did not fully comply with a subpoena demanding the return of classified records, prompting agents to return home with a search warrant so they could gather more material.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-documents-more-found-wilmington-delaware-home/
