WASHINGTON — President Biden’s lawyers reportedly found some classified documents at his former office in Washington.
Update at 6:53 p.m. EST on Jan. 10: On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said that he was “surprised” when he was told that government records were found in his former office by his attorneys, according to The Associated Press. Biden told reporters in Mexico City that his attorneys did exactly what they should have done by contacting the National Archives.
Original Report: The documents are reportedly from when Biden was vice president. The documents were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2 as they were packing up files at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the White House said Monday, according to The New York Times.
The documents were reportedly found in a closet in Biden’s former office and that closet was locked, according to The Associated Press.
The Times reported that officials have not described what kind of information is on the documents or their level of classification.
The White House Counsel’s Office reportedly notified the National Archives and Records Administration the same day the documents were discovered and were turned in the next day, according to The Times.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to reportedly review those documents and see how they ended up at the Penn Biden Center, according to CBS News. This review is considered to be preliminary and the attorney general will decide if further investigation is needed.
Former President Donald Trump nominated Lausch to be U.S. attorney, according to CBS News. He is reportedly one of the only two current U.S. attorneys to still be serving from the Trump era. Reportedly, the other U.S. attorney is David Weiss in Delaware who is apparently investigating Hunter Biden.
According to the AP, Trump on his social media site asked when the FBI was planning to raid Biden’s house or the White House in reference to the raid that was recently done at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence over classified documents.
Lausch will be submitting a final report to Garland, CBS News reported. That review is expected to finish soon.
Fifteen boxes of records were reportedly removed from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI in August, according to the AP.
White House officials said the difference in this situation is that Biden was not under review for how he handled documents and he did not refuse to hand them over, according to The Times.
The Presidential Records Act is in place to require that all presidential and vice-presidential documents and forms are turned over to the National Archives, according to CBS News. There are reportedly protocols in place to keep classified information and documents secure.
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