WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said Monday, prompting the Justice Department to review the situation to determine how to proceed.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said Monday, prompting the Justice Department to review the situation to determine how to proceed.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said Monday, prompting the Justice Department to review the situation to determine how to proceed.
The documents, which date to Biden’s time as vice president, were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2 when they were packing files at an office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, according to the White House. Officials did not describe what kind of information the documents included or their level of classification.
The White House said in a statement that the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives and Records Administration on the same day the documents were found and that they were turned over the following day. The discovery was not in response to any prior request from the archives, nor is there any indication that Biden or his team resisted efforts to recover these or any other sensitive documents.
Senior Justice Department officials have assigned John R. Lausch Jr., the U.S. attorney in Chicago who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, to look into the matter, according to two people familiar with the decision, confirming a CBS News report. The White House statement said that it “is cooperating” with the department.
Trump, who is under criminal investigation for taking hundreds of classified documents when he left the White House and failing to return all of them even after being subpoenaed by the government, jumped on the news.
