FILE PHOTO: Joe Biden walks past solar panels while touring the Plymouth Area Renewable Energy Initiative in Plymouth, New Hampshire, US, June 4, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s legal team has discovered a second set of classified documents from his time as vice president at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, the White House said on Thursday.
The statement by Richard Sauber, a special counsel to Biden, came days after the White House said an earlier batch of documents had been discovered in November in the closet of an office at a University of Pennsylvania think tank that Biden had used after leaving the vice presidency.
The discoveries have presented legal and political headaches for Biden as he prepares for an expected 2024 re-election campaign in the upcoming months.
A single document was found in a room adjacent to the garage in Wilmington and no documents were found in the Bidens’ Rehoboth Beach home, Sauber said in a statement. The administration is “fully cooperating” to ensure that the records are handled properly, Sauber said.
There are differences between the revelation that Biden’s legal team found classified documents in his properties and the ongoing Justice Department investigation into former President Donald Trump’s refusal to hand over classified documents taken from the White House.
Trump kept thousands of government records, a few hundred of which were marked as classified, inside his personal residence in Florida for more than a year after departing the White House, and did not return them immediately or willingly despite numerous requests by the National Archives.
When he finally handed over 15 boxes of records in January 2022, the Archives discovered more than 100 were marked as classified. It referred the matter to the Justice Department in the spring and a special counsel has been named to oversee the investigation.