San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTS FOUND AT BIDEN’S HOME, WHITE HOUSE SAYS
Total of 6 pages transferred from Wilmington, Del.
Five more pages containing classified information were found at President Joe Biden’s Delaware home on Thursday, the White House said Saturday, bringing the tally to six such pages uncovered this past week.
The additional pages, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said, were discovered hours after a White House statement Thursday morning that cited only one that Biden’s aides had discovered the night before in a storage area adjacent to the garage of his home in Wilmington.
On Thursday evening, the White House said, Justice Department officials had gone to retrieve that page, and a White House lawyer had met them to oversee the transfer. Five additional classified pages were then identified among the materials with it.
The revelation came as Biden’s lawyers provided new details about their unfolding discovery over the past two months of classified materials from his time as vice president at his house and an office he used before beginning his 2020 campaign for the White House. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel Thursday to investigate Biden’s handling of sensitive records.
They also defended their decision not to be fully forthcoming about the matter. The White House has been criticized over its public disclosures, including why it did not reveal the discoveries much earlier, and why, when it acknowledged
Monday that some classified files had been found at Biden’s office Nov. 2, it did not indicate that more had been found at his house the next month.
Biden’s lead personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s legal team had tried to balance being transparent with “the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”
“These considerations require avoiding the public release of detail relevant to the investigation while it is ongoing,” he added.
He cited multiple rationales: Investigators at the Justice Department could object that identifying witnesses, documents or events as the investigation was under way could compromise their work. And revealing certain details in public also posed the risk that as more information emerged, earlier statements could prove to be “incomplete.”
It was the White House lawyer, Richard Sauber, who said in a statement early Thursday that a single-page classified document had been discovered a day earlier among stored materials in a room adjacent to the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home.
Bauer said in his statement Saturday that once Biden’s aides uncovered the document, they “left the document where it was found and suspended their search of the specific space where it was located.” They notified the Justice Department the next morning.
Sauber said in a statement Saturday that because he has security clearance, he had gone to Wilmington on Thursday evening to oversee the transfer of the document. When Justice Department personnel arrived, he continued, “five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” which officials “immediately took possession of.”
A person familiar with the matter said the six pages comprised more than one document.
Bauer also issued a timeline that filled in certain details.
After Biden’s personal lawyers discovered Obamaera documents Nov. 2 in a closet of an office Biden had used at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, the White House notified the National Archives and Records Administration of their discovery.
For the next eight days, Biden’s personal lawyers worked with the archives until Nov. 10, when the Justice Department informed them that it had begun a preliminary inquiry into what happened.
The National Archives’ inspector general told the Justice Department about the matter Nov. 4, and the department opened an inquiry Nov. 9.