Classified Documents from Biden’s Vice Presidency Discovered at Think Tank

President Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, a White House lawyer said on Monday, according to CBS News. The documents were found on Nov. 2 by Biden’s lawyers while they were packing files at an office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and date to his time as vice president, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president stated.

Sources did not tell CBS News what the documents contain nor their level of classification, but did say that roughly 10 documents were found. Notably, a source also clarified that the documents do not contain nuclear secrets.

The FBI is involved in an inquiry assigned to the U.S. attorney in Chicago by Attorney General Merrick Garland to review the documents, say reports.

Biden used the office space from mid-2017 to until the spring of 2019, the start of his 2020 presidential campaign. On the day of the discovery of the classified material, Sauber said the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives, which took possession of the documents the following morning. He added that the White House was cooperating with the National Archives and the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is separately investigating former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of 15 boxes of highly classified national security documents that he kept after leaving the White House in January 2021. Although Trump claimed that some documents seized by the Department of Justice from his Mar-a-Lago estate are both personal property and subject to executive privilege, it was an argument the Justice Department said Trump “cannot logically assert,” according to a report from The New York Times. 

In August last year, the Justice Department released a redacted version of the affidavit that led to the authorization of the search, which revealed that the FBI identified “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET” in the trove of documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

In response to the classified documents found at Biden’s think tank, Trump took his shot on Truth Social late Monday, posting, “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified.”