(updated with details)
WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) – Lawyers for Joe Biden have discovered a small amount of classified documents in the garage of his private residence in Wilmington, Delaware, the U.S. president announced on Thursday.
“They finished their search last night,” Joe Biden told reporters. “They discovered a small amount of documents belonging to the classified documents category in storage spaces and in my personal library.”
“As I said this week, I take classified document cases very seriously…I have also stated that we are fully cooperating with the Department of Justice,” he added.
A lawyer from
the White House announced on Tuesday
that several classified documents dating from the time when Joe Biden was vice-president of the United States had been found last November by the lawyers of the American president in the premises of a think tank in Washington.
These embarrassing findings come to light as the US president prepares for the 2024 election campaign when he is expected to seek re-election.
According to Richard Sauber, special adviser to the president, only one document was found in a room adjacent to the garage in the Wilmington residence and no others were discovered in the Rehoboth Beach property the Bidens own on the Atlantic coast.
Before Joe Biden, his predecessor in the White House Donald Trump was also implicated for having kept thousands of government documents, even if the former president refused to hand them over to justice.
When he finally relented, after an FBI search, National Archives officials discovered that more than a hundred of them were considered classified.
For Republicans, these findings highlight the “hypocrisy” of Joe Biden.
“It’s blatant. It’s in plain sight,” protested Republican Representative Mike Johnson. “Why didn’t the Justice Department intervene in force as it did when allegations were made against President Trump?”.
(Jeff Mason report, written by Katharine Jackson, French version Bertrand Boucey and Nicolas Delame)