Five further pages with secret markings were discovered by US President Joe Biden’s attorneys at his house in Wilmington, Delaware, and were turned over to the Department of Justice.
Richard Sauber, a lawyer for the White House, said in a statement on Saturday that he discovered the extra pages on Thursday while at the president’s house to enable the handover of a document that had been marked as secret before.
“Five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who were with me.” The DOJ representatives who were with me instantly seized control of them.
The most recent admission comes on top of the finding of papers from Biden’s time as vice president during the Obama administration that were found in his garage in December and at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, in November.
Robert Hur, a former US attorney who was named as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland, is looking into the potential mishandling of secret information and official records from the Obama administration.
According to Sauber, the White House was “confident that a careful examination will demonstrate that these documents were accidentally misplaced, and the president and his counsel acted swiftly upon knowledge of this error.”
The White House’s two-day delay in providing a revised tally of the number of classified records was not explained by Sauber’s statement. The White House has already come under fire for delaying its announcement of the initial batch of documents found in Biden’s office by more than two months.
According to Sauber’s statement, Biden’s attorneys took “prompt and voluntary action” to turn over all of the discovered documents to the appropriate authorities.
“We have now made explicit information about the papers found, how they were found, and where they were found publicly available. We will now transmit specific inquiries to the special counsel’s office going forward because the special counsel was appointed in this case this week, he said.
The White House would assist Hur’s probe, Sauber continued.
For Biden, the matter is an unpleasant diversion as he gets ready to declare whether he will run for office again.
The president said to reporters on Thursday, “It’s not like they’re sitting out in the street.” “People are aware that I take classified information seriously.”
Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, stated that his team “attempted to balance the need of public disclosure where appropriate with the established standards and constraints essential to maintain the integrity of the investigation.”
James Comer, a conservative from Kentucky who chairs an oversight committee, has offered to lead the investigation because Republicans, who have just taken control of the House of Representatives, will do so.
“The opacity of the Biden White House in this subject is concerning. The fact that Biden staffers were looking through papers while anticipating the appointment of a Special Counsel is also disturbing, according to Comer.
He criticized what he dubbed “President Biden’s three strikes against transparency,” saying that “many questions need to be answered but one thing is certain: oversight is coming.”
Republicans have also attempted to draw comparisons between the inquiry into Biden’s handling of sensitive documents and the ongoing investigations into former President Donald Trump’s handling of such documents after he left office.
The FBI searched Trump’s Florida residence in August, but the White House has emphasized that the two situations are distinct since Biden and his team are complying with the authorities and have turned over the sensitive material.
Special counsel Jack Smith is looking into whether anyone attempted to hinder their inquiry into the retention of secret records at the Palm Beach residence in the context of Trump. According to Justice Department officials, when a subpoena requesting the handover of sensitive data was not completely complied with by Trump’s lawyers, investigators were forced to return to the residence with a search warrant in order to gather more evidence.
