The White House revealed on Saturday that President Biden’s lawyers discovered additional classified documents this week at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. This is the latest in a series of revelations about the discovery of top-secret government documents that are currently the focus of a Justice Department special counsel investigation.
Due to their lack of security clearance, Biden’s personal attorneys only discovered one document on Wednesday with a secret marking in a room next to the garage. They therefore ceased examining the property.
Richard Sauber, a White House attorney with clearance, later arrived to the Wilmington home on Thursday and discovered five more documents marked “classified,” according to Sauber. Sauber says, “Because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document the President’s personal counsel found on Wednesday to the Justice Department,” Sauber said. “While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”
In an effort to show cooperation with the Justice Department’s inquiry, Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, also made a public timeline of events related the finding of secret materials at Biden’s office and his Wilmington home available on Saturday.
In the statement, Biden’s attorneys list the various actions they have taken since last November, when they came across what the White House described as a “small number” of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a center in Washington, D.C., where Biden maintained an office after serving as vice president.
“The President’s personal attorneys have attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity,” Bauer said in his statement. “These considerations require avoiding the public release of detail relevant to the investigation while it is ongoing.”
Regarding the statements made on Saturday, the Justice Department declined to comment.
An individual with knowledge of the situation claimed that Pat Moore, a longtime Biden lawyer who worked as deputy general counsel for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, was the attorney who initially discovered the secret documents. After the election, Moore remained to represent Biden outside the White House, although he would begin working as the first assistant attorney general for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office the following week. Moore opted not to respond.
