Justice Department officials conducting a search of President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday uncovered an additional six classified documents on the premises, the president’s lawyer said Saturday evening.
The search, which took over 13 hours to complete, resulted in authorities seizing “materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President,” Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, said in a statement. Investigators also took “for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”
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Richard Sauber, who serves as White House special counsel, released a separate statement Saturday stating that the president and first lady Jill Biden were not present during the search. Instead, the Bidens are spending this chilly January weekend at their beach home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, though White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say whether they were avoiding their primary home-state residence.
Representatives from both the personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office were on hand for the Wilmington property search “by agreement with DOJ,” according to Bauer.
Bauer’s statement also said that he and the president voluntarily offered to provide law enforcement officials with “prompt access” to Biden’s property and that the DOJ had requested the search not be made public in advance.
Investigators on the scene “covered all working, living, and storage spaces in the home” and were given “full access to … personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades.”
The six items now join the other classified government materials uncovered at the president’s Wilmington residence and his think tank’s Washington, D.C., office. There are many unanswered questions regarding why Biden had classified documents from his vice presidency at his think tank’s Washington, D.C., office and his Wilmington home, in addition to the circumstances in which they were found.
The White House has also faced criticism over how transparent the administration has been on the matter. The first classified documents were uncovered at the think tank office in early November, but the matter was kept private. The discovery of these materials was never made public by the White House or Biden’s personal attorneys and only exposed through a CBS News report published earlier this month. An additional search executed in December found a “small number” of classified records. A third tranche of classified documents was discovered during a mid-January search of the Wilmington property by the president’s legal team.
The White House press shop has declined to answer reporters’ questions on why the president did not reveal the document discoveries in the two months before the CBS report came out. The Friday search of Biden’s home by DOJ officials, and the subsequent fourth tranche of classified materials being discovered, comes after Jean-Pierre had said that the searches of Biden’s residence were complete. It is unclear if she was referring to searches conducted by the president’s lawyers.
The situation has put Biden in an uncomfortable political position. The president campaigned on promises of transparency and condemned former President Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified documents after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate last August. As he mulls a reelection bid and appears to be nearing an announcement, Biden faces the task of explaining to voters why his handling of classified information was better than that Trump, who has already declared his 2024 candidacy.
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The White House and elected Democrats have sought to highlight the differences in the Biden and Trump cases, including the number of documents obtained in each discovery, which was hundreds in the case of Trump and about 30 for Biden. Other key differences related to how the documents were discovered and obtained and the responses to the discoveries. Biden and his team have cooperated with the DOJ since notifying them of the documents in November, while the National Archives had unsuccessfully tried to recover hundreds of records from Trump and eventually turned to DOJ for assistance. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed separate special counsels to investigate both cases.
Biden has remained defiant on the matter, saying on Thursday during a trip to California: “We’re fully cooperating, looking forward to getting this resolved quickly. I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no ‘there’ there.”
