WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI raided President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home on Friday and found six additional documents containing classification marks, as well as some of his notes, the president said. attorney said on Saturday.
The president’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, said the search of the entire property lasted nearly 13 hours. The apparently classified documents spanned Biden’s senator and vice presidency, but the memo was from his vice presidency. As the Department of Justice reviews the records, it was not immediately clear what level of classification and whether they remained classified.
The raid comes more than a week after Biden’s lawyers found six other classified documents in the vice president’s home library, and the Penn lawyer found a handful of classified records in his former office at the Biden Center. It took place about three months after Washington. A day after Biden claimed “there’s nothing there” about finding the documents, it became a political headache for the president, blaming ex-President Donald Trump for keeping classified documents and official records after he resigned. complicating the Justice Department investigation. .
“It turned out that a handful of documents had been stored in the wrong place,” Biden told reporters who questioned him during a tour of the California storm damage. “We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Department of Justice.”
“We are fully cooperating and look forward to a speedy resolution to this matter,” Biden said.
The President and First Lady Jill Biden were not home during the raid. They spent the weekend at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
It remains to be seen if additional searches by federal officials elsewhere will be conducted.Biden’s personal attorney previously said that a search of the Rehoboth Beach residence was conducted but no official documents or confidential records were found.
Bauer said the FBI had asked the White House not to comment on the investigation before it was conducted, and Biden’s personal attorney and White House attorney were present. The FBI had “complete access to the president’s home, including personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and decades-old reminders,” he added. .
The Justice Department “has obtained material deemed to be within the scope of its investigation,” he added, from his tenure as vice president. ”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Herr as a special counsel to investigate potential misconduct surrounding the Biden dossier.
“From the beginning, the president has promised to handle this responsibly because he takes this seriously,” White House attorney Richard Sauber said Saturday. We look forward to working with the Department of Justice and the Special Counsel to help ensure that this process is carried out quickly and efficiently.”
The discovery of the Biden dossier and the investigation into Trump in the hands of Special Counsel Jack Smith are vastly different. Trump took hundreds of classified records with him when he left the White House in early 2021, resisting months of demands to return them to the government, according to the Justice Department. has emphasized cooperating with the Justice Department’s investigations in every way, but questions remain about his transparency to the public.
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Sung Min Kim, Associated Press writer in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, contributed to this report.