Aides to U.S. President Joe Biden have discovered at least one more batch of classified documents in a separate location from the office of a think tank he used after serving as vice president, news outlets reported Wednesday. Reported with reference to unknown sources.
According to a report by NBC News, which first broke the news, and according to CNN, Biden aides have been looking for additional classified material that may be in other locations since Nov. I found a set of classified documents at a Washington-based think tank.
The classification level, number and exact location of the additional documents were not immediately clear, NBC News reported. He also said it was unclear when the additional documents were discovered and whether the search for any other classified material from Biden’s time as vice president had been completed.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, has called for a briefing on the discovery of the first Biden document, he said Tuesday.
A spokesman for Sen. Marco Rubio, the committee’s Republican vice chair, said Rubio and Warner wrote to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes asking for access to classified documents.
The two senators also requested briefings on damage estimates by the intelligence community and the retention of classified documents by both Biden, a Democrat, and Republican former President Donald Trump.
Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, echoed a similar request sent to Haynes on Tuesday.
The reports come two days after a White House lawyer said classified documents from Biden’s vice presidential days were discovered by the president’s personal lawyers at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement think tank in November.
Biden’s lawyers discovered less than a dozen classified records inside the office at the center, and notified the U.S. National Archives of their discovery, turned over the contents, and said they were cooperating with the archives and the Justice Department. . The president said Tuesday that he and his team are cooperating fully with the investigation into what happened.
The Justice Department is separately investigating Trump’s handling of highly sensitive classified documents that he kept at his Florida resort after he left the White House in January 2021.
For more than a year after leaving the White House, Trump kept thousands of government records inside his Florida residence, a few hundred of which were marked classified, and multiple requests from the National Archives. However, he did not return them immediately or willingly.
When he finally handed over 15 boxes of records in January 2022, the archives discovered that more than 100 were marked as classified. He referred the case to the Justice Department in the spring.
FBI agents conducted a court-authorized search in August. 8 of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Of the thousands of records seized, about 100 documents have been marked as classified.