Documents considered classified were found at President Joe Biden’s home from his time serving as President Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden attorney Richard Sauber said. It was the second location where classified documents were found.
Sauber said that Biden and his legal team are “fully cooperating” with the National Archives and the Department of Justice.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said that he appointed Robert Hur as special counsel. Special counsels are generally appointed when there are investigations involving major federal politicians.
Sauber said the first set of documents was found in November 2022 at the Penn Biden Center. Lawyers have since searched other places where documents from his vice presidential office were shipped during the 2017 transition. Sauber said Biden’s lawyers immediately contacted the DOJ to take possession of the documents.
“During the review, the lawyers discovered among personal and political papers a small number of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings," Sauber said. “All but one of these documents were found in storage space in the President’s Wilmington residence garage. One document consisting of one page was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room.”
Thursday’s statement by Sauber was the most extensive account of how Biden ended up with these documents after leaving the Obama administration in 2017. Biden said he did not know what was contained in the documents found at the Penn Biden Center.
“They immediately called the Archives -- immediately called the Archives, turned them over to the Archives,” he said. “And I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office.”
After Garland announced Hur's appointment, Sauber said it will cooperate with the special counsel.
"We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake," Sauber said.
