The White House announced on Saturday that more classified documents had been found in the former vice president’s possession, this time inside his home in Wilmington, Del.
The additional pages were found after a White House statement on Thursday that only one document had turned up in a storage area adjacent to the garage. At that time, Biden’s lead lawyer, Richard Sauber, said that since the lawyers searching the premises were not authorized to view classified material, they left the premises.
An additional six pages of classified documents were later uncovered by Justice Department investigators in Biden’s residence.
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There has been much criticism leveled at Biden’s attorneys for their lack of transparency in waiting two months to report news about the finding.
After Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers discovered Obama-era documents on Nov. 2 in a closet of an office Mr. Biden had used in the Penn Biden Center, the timeline said, the White House notified the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, of their discovery, “consistent with statutory requirements.”
For the next eight days, the timeline said, Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers worked with the agency until Nov. 10, when the Justice Department informed them that it had launched an inquiry into what happened.
“Once the president’s personal attorneys heard from D.O.J., the president’s personal attorneys were in regular contact with D.O.J.,” Mr. Bauer said.
There’s no reason that Biden aides or staff couldn’t have informed the Justice Department a lot sooner, if not immediately after the discovery. The obvious explanation for the delay was so that the president’s handlers could game out a response that deflected as much blame from Biden as possible.
Mr. Biden’s lead personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Biden’s legal team had tried to balance being transparent with “the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate the document scandal.
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