Biden Lawyers Found Classified Docs From VP Days In Private Office, White House Says

President Joe Biden’s attorneys found a small number of classified documents in a private office last year before turning them over to the National Archives, the White House said in a statement Monday.

The documents are from Biden’s time as vice president and were found in a locked closet at a think tank in Washington in November. Biden used the office for several years from 2017 to 2020, a special counsel appointed to look into the matter said in a statement. The president’s personal lawyers notified the National Archives, which is tasked with maintaining government documents, the same day the files were found and turned them over a day later.

It’s unclear what type of information the files contained, but the White House said the Justice Department would review the episode. The Biden administration added it was “cooperating” with the DOJ.

CBS News was the first to report the discovery.

Former President Donald Trump, who is under criminal investigation for his own removal of classified documents from the White House, immediately pounced on the news. But Trump failed to note that he resisted several attempts to return those files when the National Archives demanded them. His attorneys eventually handed over boxes of documents, but investigators later found out he had even more at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida.

“When is the FBI going to raid the many houses of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump wrote on his social network Truth Social. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”

Richard Sauber, the special counsel looking into Biden’s files, suggested Monday that the matter was different, saying the documents the president’s lawyers found “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 documents are appropriately in the possession of the archives,” Sauber said in a statement.