The White House announced that lawyers found a small cache of classified documents in President Joe Biden's house in Wilmington, Delaware.
A single document was found in a room adjacent to the garage, and no records were found in the Bidens' Rehoboth Beach home, White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement. He said that the administration is "fully cooperating" to ensure that the records are handled correctly.
Richard Sauber, a special counsel to the president, said after Biden's lawyers found the initial documents, they examined other locations where records might have been shipped after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017.
Sauber said a "small number" of documents with classified markings were found in a storage space in Biden's garage in Wilmington, with one copy being located in an adjacent room. The White House did not say when the subsequent search began or when the additional documents were found, only that the investigation was completed on Wednesday evening.
Sauber said the Department of Justice was "immediately notified" after the documents were located and that department lawyers took custody of the records.
Regardless of the Justice Department review, the revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records is proving to be a, who said was "irresponsible" for keeping hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida.
Earlier this week, the White House confirmed that the department reviewed "a small number of documents with classified markings" found at the Washington office. Biden's lawyers had discovered the material at the offices of the Penn Biden Center and then immediately called the National Archives about the discovery, the White House said. Biden kept an office there after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his Democratic presidential campaign in 2019.
The revelation that Biden's team uncovered additional classified documents came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden's handling of classified information and the West Wing's management of the discovery.
She had said Wednesday that the White House was committed to handling the matter in the "right way," pointing to Biden's personal attorneys' immediate notification of the National Archives.
But she refused to say when Biden himself had been briefed, whether there were any more classified documents potentially located at other unauthorized locations, and why the White House waited more than two months to reveal the discovery of the initial batch of documents. They were found on Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections.
"As my colleagues in the Counsel have stated and said to all of you yesterday, this is an ongoing process under the review of the Department of Justice. So we will be limited on what we can say here," Jean-Pierre said.
The Justice Department is reviewing the records found at the Penn Biden Center. Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked John Lausch, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to review the matter, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press (AP) this week. That person also was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Lausch is one of the few U.S. attorneys to be held over from Trump's administration.
Biden has said he was "surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken there to that office," but his lawyers "did what they should have done" when they immediately called the National Archives.
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has requested that intelligence agencies conduct a "damage assessment" of potentially classified documents.
The revelation also may complicate the Justice Department's consideration of bringing charges against Trump. The Republican is trying to win back the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed the department's inquiry into his conduct amounted to "corruption."
Significant differences exist between the Trump and Biden situations, including the gravity of an ongoing grand jury investigation into the Mar-a-Lago matter.
