Several classified documents from the time when US President Joe Biden was vice president were discovered last fall in his personal office, Biden's lawyers admitted on Monday, writes CNN.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked Chicago prosecutors to investigate the matter, a source told CNN, and Republicans in Congress are also paying attention.
Biden's lawyers say they discovered the government materials in November when they closed the Washington, D.C., office of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which Biden used as part of his work with the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor emeritus from 2017 to 2010. year. year.
Another source told CNN that fewer than a dozen classified documents were found in Biden's office. It is unclear what the documents refer to and why they were delivered to Biden's personal office. Federal officials are required by law to surrender official documents and classified records when their government service ends.
"The White House is working with the National Archives and the Department of Justice to identify what are believed to be documents from the Obama-Biden administration, including a small number of documents marked classified," Richard Sauber, special counsel to President Biden, said in a statement.
"The documents were discovered when the president's personal attorneys were packing documents stored in a locked cabinet in preparation for vacating office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. The president used the space intermittently from mid-2017 until the start of the campaign 20 . this discovery , on November 2, 2022, the White House Prosecutor's Office notified the National Archives. The Archives received the materials the next morning," he noted.
"The discovery of these documents was made by the president's attorneys," Sauber added. records from the Obama-Biden administration were properly archived.
At a summit in Mexico City on Monday night, Biden ignored reporters' questions about classified documents.
The discovery of the documents took place against the background of the special prosecutor Jack Smith's investigation into the case of former US President Donald Trump about the possible mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in the resort of Florida. Federal investigators discovered at least 325 classified documents from Trump as part of their investigation.