During the course of a 13-hour search of Vice President Joe Biden’s residence in Delaware, investigators from the US Department of Justice (DoJ) discovered six additional classified documents, according to a lawyer representing Mr. Biden.
The documents that were found on Friday at the property in Wilmington date back to when he was serving as a senator, and others date back to when he was serving under Barack Obama as vice president.
According to attorney Bob Bauer, “personally handwritten notes” and “surrounding materials” were also removed.
The Vice President and his wife were not in attendance.
In a statement released by Mr. Bauer on Saturday, the president offered to let the Department of Justice have access “to his residence to allow DoJ to conduct a search of the full premises for potential vice-presidential records and potential classified material,” Mr. Bauer said.
A criminal inquiry is now being conducted over allegations that former President Donald Trump mishandled classified information.
At the beginning of this month, Mr. Biden’s legal team disclosed that a first batch of classified documents had been discovered on November 2 at the Penn Biden Center, which is a think tank in Washington, DC, that was established by the President.
According to his lawyers, a second group of records was discovered on the 20th of December in the garage of his Wilmington home, and another document was discovered in a storage space at the house on the 12th of January. Both of these discoveries were made at the same residence.
The president has stated that as soon as his team discovered the records, they promptly delivered them to the National Archives as well as the Justice Department. There is no obvious reason for Mr. Biden to have kept them.
After the end of each administration, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act, all of the records from the White House are to be transferred to the National Archives, where they can be safely archived.
Regarding the inquiry into the handling of the sensitive papers, a special lawyer by the name of Robert Hur has been assigned to take the lead.
The extensive search, followed by the discovery of additional documents, has created a political issue for the president just as he is getting ready to announce whether or not he will seek reelection in 2024.
Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, are spending the weekend in Rehoboth Beach, which is located in Delaware on the coast and is one of the locations where they have a second home. According to his lawyers’ statements to the New York Times, a search was conducted earlier this month, but no documents were discovered during the search.
Anthony Zurcher, a correspondent for BBC North America, says that the delay of two months between the initial discovery of the Biden email a few days before the midterm elections and the news being made public in January raises awkward questions for the president about the administration’s level of transparency.
The team working for Mr. Biden maintains that the president has provided full cooperation to the Department of Justice investigation. Mr. Biden has attempted to downplay the scandal by characterizing it as an oversight and has stated that he does not “regret” the fact that he did not make the finding of some classified files public before the midterm elections in November.
The finding comes at the same time that former President of the United States Donald Trump is the subject of an investigation into allegations that he failed to comply with a subpoena and mishandled hundreds of secret documents when he was staying at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The materials were not handed over by Mr. Trump or his legal team until the FBI conducted a raid on his Florida vacation home in August last year. He claims that the FBI is giving President Biden preferential treatment in their investigations.
At the time, President Biden stated that Mr. Trump’s handling of the materials constituted “complete and utter irresponsibility.”
Mr. Trump has not provided any explanation to justify their placement there, but he has stated that he had the authority as president to declassify them, which is a claim that has been contested by legal authorities.