Aides to President Joe Biden have reportedly found at least one other batch of classified documents stored at a different location than Biden’s private Washington, D.C., office where classified papers were found last year.
A personal attorney for Biden discovered 10 classified documents in the president’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington in November. Those documents have since been turned over to the National Archives. The initial incident prompted Biden aides to begin searching the president’s other known spaces for additional documents, however, according to NBC News.
It is unclear where the additional documents were found, when they were found, and if the search for additional documents is still ongoing. It is also unclear what classification level the documents were marked as or what information is contained within them, according to NBC.
After the original batch of classified documents was found in November, Biden aides began sifting through boxes of documents from the Biden’s stint as vice president to locate other documents that should have been turned over to the National Archives.
The first batch of classified documents was found in an envelope kept in Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center on November 2, days before the midterm elections. Special counsel to the president Richard Sauber confirmed the discovery of 10 classified documents in Biden’s office on Monday.
“The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys,” Sauber said. “The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives.”
Those documents are reported to contain U.S. intelligence memos and briefing materials on Iran, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, though it is unclear what exact information is covered.
The classified document scandal has drawn comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s ongoing legal battle over classified documents he allegedly kept at his residence at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, after leaving the White House in January 2021.
“The only person that has the constitutional ability to declassify any documents is the president of the United States, not the vice president,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said Tuesday. “If then-Vice President Biden took classified documents with him and held them for years and criticized former President Trump during that same time that he had those classified documents, and only after it was uncovered did he turn them back, I wonder why the press isn’t asking the same questions of him.”
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, requested information over Biden’s classified documents from the National Archives on Tuesday.