The White House says five additional classified documents were discovered at Joe Biden’s residence on Thursday. In a statement, special counsel to the president, Richard Sauber, said the five documents were found while he and a group of Justice Department officials were in the process of handling a document discovered by Mr Biden’s personal lawyers earlier in the week.
Mr Sauber said the additional documents had not been identified when the other document was found because Mr Biden’s personal attorneys lack the requisite security clearances to handle documents with classification markings.
Since Mr Biden’s private legal team, which includes ex-White House counsel Robert Bauer, are not legally permitted to view or handle such documents, they stopped their search of the box the documents were in when they discovered the first document.
“The president’s personal attorneys conducting the searches do not have active security clearances, so if they identified a document with a classified marking, they stopped and did not review it, and suspended any further search in that box, file or other specific space where the document was found, as appropriate,” he said.
“This is what occurred in Wilmington on Wednesday when the president’s personal attorneys discovered one document with a classified marking consisting of one page in a room adjacent to the garage. At that point, the president’s personal attorneys stopped searching the immediate area where the document was found.”
Mr Sauber added the “next step” in the process, which he described as being “coordinated” with the Justice Department, was to have department officials take possession of the initial document.
He said he travelled to Wilmington, Delaware, to “facilitate” providing the first document to the DOJ because he holds an appropriate security clearance.
“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” he said, adding that the Justice Department “immediately took possession” of all six pages.
Continuing, Mr Sauber said the White House has now disclosed “specific details” about how the documents were found, when they were found, and where they had been located, and directed further questions to Robert Hur, the Department of Justice special counsel who attorney general Merrick Garland has named to oversee an inquiry into how the documents ended up at Mr Biden’s residence and at a think tank in Washington where he had kept an office while out of government service.
“The appointment of the special counsel in this matter this week means we will now refer specific questions to the special counsel’s office moving forward. As I said Thursday, the White House will cooperate with the newly-appointed special counsel,” he said.
It’s unclear whether the five additional pages are individual documents or part of a larger document, but the White House’s disclosure of this latest discovery comes on the heels of questions over why Mr Biden and his team did not come forward more quickly after documents with classified markings were found at the Penn Biden Centre, a Washington DC think tank where Mr Biden kept an office between mid 2017 and 2020.
According to a statement released to the press by Mr Bauer, the document discovered on Wednesday was found when Mr Biden’s private legal team searched his two Delaware homes – his main residence in Wilmington and his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach – for additional records following the 2 November discovery of Obama-era records at the Penn Biden Centre.
Mr Bauer said Mr Biden’s legal team had found what he described as “a potential record bearing classified markings” at the president’s Wilmington home, “among stored materials inside a room adiacent to the garage” on 11 January.
“Once the president's personal attorneys found this document, the president's personal attorneys left the document where it was found and suspended their search of the specific space where it was located. Following the search at the Wilmington residence, the attorneys proceeded to the Rehoboth residence and conducted a search there. No potential records were identified at the Rehoboth Beach residence, and the attorneys returned to Washington DC late in the evening,” he said.
Mr Bauer added that he and Mr Biden’s personal attorneys notified the Department of Justice of the additional discovery on 12 January, the day Mr Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel. Mr Biden’s lawyers began to arrange for the transfer of that document to the Justice Department that same day, which is how Mr Sauber came to be at Mr Biden’s home.
He also stressed that the president’s private counsel does not know many details about the documents.
“Whenever a document bearing classified markings was identified, the search was suspended of the box, file or other space where the document was discovered, with the potentially classified material left in place as found. It is for this reason that the president’s personal attorneys do not know the precise number of pages in the discovered material, nor have they reviewed the content of the documents, consistent with standard procedures and requirements,” he said.
