In Washington
According to reports on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources, Biden’s aides discovered at least one more batch of classified documents in a location other than the think tank office he used after leaving office as vice president.
Since a collection of classified documents were discovered in November at the Washington-based think tank, Biden’s staff has been looking for additional files that may be in other places, according to a report in NBC News and CNN, which broke the story first.
The classification level, quantity, and exact location of the extra records were not immediately evident, according to the NBC News report. In addition, it was noted that it was unclear when the extra papers were found and whether the search for any other classified records Biden could have had during his stint as vice president was finished.
When Reuters asked the White House for a comment, they did not answer right away.
Senator Mark Warner, who is a Democrat and heads the Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday that he has asked for a briefing on the first Biden document leak.
Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner wrote to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, according to a representative for Rubio, the committee’s Republican vice chair. They requested access to the sensitive materials.
The two senators also asked for a damage assessment from the intelligence community and a briefing from Democratic Vice President Joe Biden and Republican former President Donald Trump over the retention of secret documents.
On Tuesday, Republican Representative Mike Turner of the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence made a comparable request to Haines.
The reports came two days after a White House attorney said that the president’s personal attorneys at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement think tank had found classified materials from Biden’s time as vice president in November.
Less than a dozen classified documents were found by Biden’s lawyers inside the center’s office. They informed the U.S. National Archives of their find, handed over the documents, and stated that they were working with the Archives and the Justice Department. The president declared on Tuesday that he and his staff were fully assisting with an investigation into what transpired.
The management of highly sensitive confidential information that Trump kept at his Florida estate after leaving the White House in January 2021 is the subject of a separate investigation by the Justice Department.
After leaving the White House, Trump kept thousands of government documents inside his Florida home for over a year, refusing to return them immediately or voluntarily despite repeated requests from the National Archives. A small number of these documents were marked as classified.
In January 2022, when he finally turned over 15 boxes of records, the Archives found that more than 100 of them were classified. In the spring, it forwarded the case to the Justice Department.
On August 8, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was searched by FBI agents following a court-authorized search. Among the tens of thousands of records seized were about 100 classified documents.
