US President Joe Biden’s legal team has unearthed more classified documents outside of office just days after the first verdict was discovered in his former Washington office.
The second discovery came after Mr. Biden’s staff began looking through documents at various locations to see if there were more classified materials to report, US broadcaster NBC reported.
It is not yet clear when the documents were found and how confidential they are.
The White House said on Monday that the Justice Department was investigating the discovery of a “small amount” of classified documents found in the office where Biden worked after the end of his vice presidency in 2017.
All White House records, including classified documents, are to be returned to the National Archives after the end of the administration.
In a separate event, the Justice Department is investigating former US President Donald Trump’s handling of highly classified documents he kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left the White House in January 2021.
Mr. Biden’s lawyers found the first documents at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which Mr. Biden used prior to his 2019 presidential campaign, and immediately moved them to the White House National Archives. House said.
On Tuesday, the president said he was “surprised” to learn of the discovery, adding that his lawyers “did what they had to do” when they immediately called the National Archives to report it.
The 80-year-old Democratic leader added that his team is fully cooperating in assessing what happened.
The discovery of the second set of documents by Mr. Biden’s lawyers came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say if there could be other classified documents in unauthorized locations, or when Mr. Biden was briefed.
She also declined to say why it took the White House two months to make the first discovery public, just days before the November congressional elections.
“This is an ongoing process overseen by the Ministry of Justice, so we will limit what we can say here,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has requested a briefing on the first discovery, he said Tuesday.
A spokesman for Senator Marco Rubio, the committee’s Republican vice chairman, said Mr. Rubio and Mr. Warner had written to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes asking for access to classified documents.
The two senators also called on the intelligence community to conduct a damage assessment and a briefing on keeping classified information from both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.
Additional agency reporting
Source: I News
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