US reviewing classified papers tied to Biden center

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is reviewing a batch of classified documents that were found in President Biden’s former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said Monday.

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 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 US 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. “When is the FBI going to raid the many houses of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”

The latter line in Trump’s statement appeared to refer to his disputed claim in public that before leaving office, he declassified all the documents the FBI found at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. No credible evidence has emerged to support that claim, and his lawyers have resisted repeating it in court, where there are professional consequences for lying. In any case, the potential charges the FBI cited in the search warrant affidavit do not depend on whether intentionally mishandled documents were classified.

But while Trump tried to suggest a parallel, the circumstances of the Biden discovery as described so far are significantly different. Unlike Trump, Biden was not under review for his handling of documents nor did he refuse to turn them over, according to the White House statement. By promptly revealing the discovery to the archives and returning them within a day, Biden made no known effort to resist the proper disposition of the papers.

Still, whatever the legal questions, as a matter of political reality, the discovery will make the optics of the Justice Department potentially charging Trump over his handling of the documents more difficult. Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned that investigation, along with one into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, to Jack Smith, serving as a special counsel.