WASHINGTON (AFP) – Five additional pages of classified material have been found at Joe Biden’s family home in Delaware, the White House said on Saturday in a new twist in a politically sensitive affair for the president in the United States (US).
It was the latest in a series of revelations about the apparently improper storage of papers dating from Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Biden has said he had no intention of keeping any classified documents.
White House lawyer Richard Sauber said the latest papers were found after he visited the home last Thursday to oversee the transfer to the Justice Department of a first batch of documents found a day earlier in a room next to the home’s garage.
Biden’s personal lawyers searching the garage at the home in Wilmington, Delaware, where the 80-year-old president often spends weekends had found a document marked classified in the garage itself.
As these attorneys lacked the necessary security clearance to read it, they notified the Justice Department, Sauber said in a statement.
A 1978 law obliges US presidents and vice presidents to hand over their emails, letters and other official documents to the National Archives.
Sauber said he does have the necessary security clearance, so he then went to the Delaware house to check out the situation for himself. That is when he found the other five pages, he said.
He said all documents were “immediately and voluntarily” handed to the Justice Department.
REPUBLICAN CRITICISM
Critics of Biden have seized on the steady series of revelations to argue that he has not been transparent and forthcoming.
Other papers had been found on November 2 at Biden’s former office at a Washington think tank, where he had offices after leaving the Obama White House.
The president’s attorneys had also found “a small number of document”, potentially confidential, on December 20 in the Wilmington garage, and alerted the Justice Department.
Amid rising furore over the discoveries in Washington, US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday named Robert Hur as an independent prosecutor to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The issue is an unwelcome distraction for Biden as he prepares to announce whether he will seek a second term.
The disclosures have prompted comparisons to the case of former president Donald Trump, who is also being investigated by a special counsel for storing hundreds of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and allegedly obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.
In contrast, Sauber emphasised that Biden had returned documents “immediately and voluntarily” when they turned up.
