The president’s counsel discovered five additional secret files while collecting a previously disclosed item
Members of the media stand along the access road to Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, January 13, 2022 © AP / Carolyn Kaster
A White House lawyer said on Saturday that he discovered five pages of classified information at the Delaware home of US President Joe Biden, days after stating that three separate stashes of secret documents were found at addresses linked to the president.
In a statement to reporters, Richard Sauber said that he traveled to Biden’s home on Thursday to collect a single page of classified information from inside the house when he found “five additional pages with classified markings” alongside it.
Justice Department officials accompanying Sauber instantly took possession of the documents, he added.
In addition to the discoveries inside Biden’s home, Sauber has also admitted this week that Biden’s legal team found classified documents at an office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement – a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania – and in the garage of Biden’s house.
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Both discoveries were made in November. Dating from Biden’s time as vice president, the Biden Center documents included sensitive information on Ukraine, Iran, and the UK, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, an appointee and ally of the president, announced on Friday that he had appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of the documents. Back in November, Garland appointed a special counsel to probe former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified files, after an FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August uncovered hundreds of government documents.
Trump claims that he declassified the files prior to removing them from the White House in 2021. Before his own private stashes of confidential files were found, Biden called Trump “totally irresponsible” for the Mar-a-Lago incident.
