US President Joe Biden
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)The US Justice Department is investigating after potentially classified documents were found at the former office of President Joe Biden.
The documents in question came from Mr Biden’s vice presidential office at a think tank in Washington DC.
Ex-president Donald Trump immediately seized on the news and questioned when the FBI would raid the “many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House.”
Trump is facing a criminal probe after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and discovered sensitive documents that had allegedly been taken from the White House after losing the 2020 presidential election.
Special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said “a small number of documents with classified markings” were discovered as Biden’s personal attorneys were clearing out the offices of the Penn Biden Center, where the president kept an office after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign in 2019.
The documents were found on November 2 last year in a “locked closet” in the office, Mr Sauber said.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” Trump wrote on the social media platform Truth Social.
Trump did not offer any evidence to back his claim that the documents were “definitely not declassified.”
The revelation comes as Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives and are promising to launch widespread investigations of Biden’s administration.
It also may complicate the Justice Department’s consideration on whether to bring charges against Trump, who has launched a repeat bid for the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed that the department’s inquiry of his own conduct amounted to “corruption.”
Representative James Comer, the new GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Monday that the revelation raised questions about the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump probe.
“Is the White House going to be raided tonight? Are they going to raid the Bidens?” he asked reporters. “This is further concern that there’s a two-tier justice system within the DOJ with how they treat Republicans versus Democrats, certainly how they treat the former president versus the current president.”
It is not currently known how the potentially classified documents came to be at the think tank, or whether Mr Biden himself was in any way involved in moving them there.
