Joe Biden speaks to the press during a visit to California
(Picture: AP)Joe Biden said there was “no there there” following the discovery of classified documents at his home and former office.
Mr Biden used the phrase, first coined by the writer Gertrude Stein, as he dismissed the scandal during a visit to storm-ravaged California.
The White House was in rare crisis mode last week as it emerged that lawyers for the president had found classified material at his think-tank in Washington DC and home in Delaware.
“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Mr Biden told reporters during a tour on Thursday of the damage caused by violent winter storms.
“We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”
Mr Biden insisted that he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.”
“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there,” he said. “There’s no there there.”
Stein used the phrase in her 1937 book ‘Everybody’s Authobiography’ to describe returning to her hometown of Oakland, California.
It has since become a popular phrase on Capitol Hill and is used to refer to something that is unsubstantial or unimportant.
First, it emerged that a “small number” with classified markings had been found in November in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center thinktank in Washington.
The president claimed that he was surprised when he was informed about them. His lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately alerted the National Archives, he said. “I don’t know what’s in the documents.”
Then came news that a second batch of classified documents had been discovered in the garage at Mr Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and one additional classified page was found in his personal library there.
Mr Biden expressed frustration that the documents matter was coming up as he surveyed coastal storm damage, telling reporters that it “bugs me” that he was being asked about the handling of the classified material even as “we have a serious problem here” in California.
“Why you don’t ask me questions about that?” he pressed.
Biden said Thursday he has “no regrets” over how and when the public learned about the documents.
“I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do,” he said.
