Pawan Kumar
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The legal team for US Vice President Joe Biden has found more classified documents in a second place, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press.
A lawyer for the president said a few days ago that Mr. Biden’s lawyers had found a “small number” of classified documents in his old office in Washington.
Mr. Biden used the office space on and off from the middle of 2017 until the beginning of his 2020 presidential campaign. This was after his time as vice president under Democratic president Barack Obama was over.
The person who talked to the Associated Press on Wednesday said that the president’s legal team found more classified information at a second location.
Classified documents from Joe Biden's vice-presidential days were discovered in November by the US president's personal attorneys at a Washington think tank, a White House lawyer said on Monday. https://t.co/S6tCgYaFbb
— breakingnews.ie (@breakingnewsie) January 10, 2023
The person was not allowed to talk about the details of the case in public, so they spoke anonymously.
They didn’t say when or where the documents were found, nor did they say what level of classification they were at.
The news that Mr. Biden’s lawyers found more classified documents came just hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avoided answering questions about how Mr. Biden handled classified information and how the West Wing handled the discovery.
She said that the White House was committed to handling the situation in the “right way.” As proof, she said that Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers told the National Archives right away.
But she wouldn’t say when Mr. Biden himself had been told or if there were any more classified documents that might be in other places where they weren’t supposed to be.
She also wouldn’t say why it took the White House more than two months to say that the first batch of documents was found on November 2, just a few days before the midterm elections.
“As my colleagues in the counsel have said and as I told you all yesterday, this is a process that is still going on and is being looked at by the Department of Justice, so what we can say here is limited,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Wednesday, the White House and the Justice Department didn’t say anything about the second set of classified records.
Biden was “surprised” by the discovery of a classified document.
The records that were found at the Penn Biden Center are being looked at by the Justice Department, and Attorney-General Merrick Garland has asked John Lausch, the US attorney in Chicago, to look into the matter, an AP source said this week.
This person was also not allowed to talk about it in public and spoke to the AP under the condition that they could not be named.
Mr. Lausch is one of the few US attorneys who still works for the US government from the time when Donald Trump was president.
No matter what the Justice Department finds, the fact that Mr. Biden may have mishandled classified or presidential records could be a political problem for the president, who called Mr. Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida “irresponsible.”
Mr. Biden said he was “surprised to learn that any government records were taken there to that office,” but his lawyers “did what they should have done” by calling the National Archives right away.
The most powerful Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has asked the US intelligence community to do a “damage assessment” of documents that might be classified.
The news may also make it harder for the Justice Department to decide whether or not to press charges against Mr. Trump, a Republican who is trying to win back the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly said that the department’s investigation into his own behaviour was “corruption.”
There are big differences between what is going on with Trump and with Biden.
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, kept thousands of government records, including a few hundred that were marked “classified,” in his Florida home for more than a year after leaving the White House. He did not return them right away or voluntarily, even though the National Archives asked him to do so many times.
In January 2022, when Mr. Trump finally gave over 15 boxes of records, the National Archives found that more than 100 of them were marked as secret. It then told the Department of Justice about the situation.
