Two people familiar with the investigation informed CBS News that Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the U.S. attorney in Chicago to examine classified materials discovered at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.
According to the sources, the group of about ten documents comes directly from Biden’s vice presidential office at the center. The FBI is helping the U.S. attorney with their investigation, CBS News has learned.
“The classified material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed,” CBS News reports.
According to Sauber, the documents were discovered when Biden’s personal attorneys “were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.”
“The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys,” Sauber said. “The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives.”
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The documents were found in a folder in a box amongst unclassified papers, sources say. It is not currently known what level of classification the documents had, but according to the sources, there were “nuclear secrets.”
“The Penn Biden Center case has parallels to the Justice Department’s pursuit of Donald Trump’s presidential records – but the scope and scale are materially different,” according to CBS.
It does not appear that a swat team was called in to search the premises, as they were in August when the FBI executed an unprecedented search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
The FBI was allegedly attempting to retrieve classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, but agents also seized boxes of records covered by attorney-client privilege and possibly executive privilege during its unprecedented raid. Days later, Attorney General Merrick Garland was revealed to have personally approved the raid, though he didn’t give many details, the same day the Washington Post absurdly claimed the FBI agents were looking for classified documents related to nuclear weapons.
Trump responded to those claims the following morning, calling it a hoax. “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more,” he said. “Same sleazy people involved.”
Many have suggested the Department of Justice wasn’t really after classified documents at all. Trump insisted the documents he had were already declassified, and that the DOJ already knew which documents were in the secured storage and had requested an additional lock be added to the door. “They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK,” Trump said in a statement in August.
Former intelligence and federal law enforcement officials previously speculated that the FBI cited missing National Archives material as an excuse to obtain the warrant needed to raid Mar-a-Lago.
When asked for his opinion on the raid of Mar-a-Lago and a photo of the allegedly classified documents found there, Biden wondered, “How that could possibly happen — how anyone could be that irresponsible?”
“Totally irresponsible,” he said at the time.
I can’t wait to hear the White House spin on this.
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