US President Joe Biden acknowledged on Thursday that a document marked confidential from his time as vice president was found in his “personal library” in Wilmington, Delaware, along with other files found in the garage.
Biden told reporters at the White House that he is “fully and completely cooperating” with a Justice Department investigation into the discovery of classified information and government files at his home and in a private office that he sometimes used as a workplace.
The president has not disclosed when this second group of documents was found. It said only that its lawyers’ assessment of possible storage locations was completed Wednesday night.
Lawyers found the first batch of confidential documents on Nov. 2, just days before last year’s midterm elections, but didn’t make their discovery public until Monday.
Dating back to Joe Biden’s vice presidency (2009-2017), this first set of confidential documents was found in a “locked closet” at the Penn Biden Center, a “think tank” affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania that uses the current head of state. .
Prior to Biden’s confirmation, the White House had already claimed that a second set of documents had been found at the home of the head of state in Wilmington, Delaware.
The president’s special adviser Richard Sauber said that after the initial documents were found by Biden’s personal attorneys, they looked at other places the documents could have been sent after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017.
Sauber claimed that a “small number” of documents marked confidential were found in a warehouse in Biden’s Wilmington garage, with one document in an adjoining room.
The White House did not say when the subsequent search began or when the additional documents were found, only that the operation concluded Wednesday night.
Sauber said the Justice Department was “immediately notified” after the documents were found and the Department’s lawyers took custody of the files.
Regardless of the Justice Department’s assessment of the documents, the revelation that Biden may have misused confidential data could jeopardize the head of state, who has denied former President Donald Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of similar documents in his Florida mansion. storage could be compromised.
When he left the White House, Trump took boxes of documents with him, even though a 1978 law requires every US president to hand over all his working documents, including letters and emails, to the National Archives.
FBI agents conducted an extensive search of Trump’s mansion on August 8 last year, based on a warrant of “confidential preservation” and “obstruction of a federal investigation,” and seized about 30 boxes. In January before that, Trump had already delivered 15 boxes.
An intense legal battle then began to determine the nature of the seized documents, some of which were marked “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential”.
This Monday, Trump questioned the FBI’s performance after the discovery of confidential Biden documents.
“When is the FBI going to raid Joe Biden’s many homes, maybe even the White House? These documents have certainly not been released”wrote Trump on his social network Truth Social.
Also on Monday night, Congressman James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters that the handling of the discovery of classified documents by Joe Biden’s lawyers demonstrates a “two-tiered” justice system.
“Are they going to invade the White House? Are they going to invade the Biden Center? I do not know. This is an added concern that there is a bipartisan justice system within the Justice Department as to how they treat the Republicans and the Democrats…certainly how they treat the former president and the current president”evaluated Comer.
Source: DN
