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Follow for the latest on the discovery of the second batch of classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency.

WASHINGTON — President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn in November that his lawyers found classified government documents in his
former office at a think tank in Washington, and he said he does not know
what information they contain.

Mr. Biden spoke a day after the White House acknowledged that his lawyers
had discovered a small cache of Obama-era documents as they packed up his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global
Engagement. The Justice Department is reviewing the discovery to determine
how to proceed.

The revelation has created a political headache for Mr. Biden, who has
called former President Donald J. Trump irresponsible for hoarding
sensitive documents at his private club and residence in Florida, and a tactical opportunity for Republicans who had been badly divided in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections.

The White House has stressed that the circumstances are different — that
Mr. Biden had neither been notified that he had official records nor been
asked to return them, and his team promptly revealed the discovery to the archives and returned them within a day.

Mr. Biden on Tuesday said he takes “classified documents seriously” and
that his team had immediately contacted the National Archives to turn over
the materials. “We’re cooperating fully — cooperating fully — with the
review,” he said.

He also distanced himself from the matter, suggesting that someone else
had brought the files there without his knowledge.

“After I was briefed about the discovery, I was surprised to learn that
there are any government records that were taken to that office,” he said
at news conference in Mexico, where he appeared with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, and Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.

“But I don’t know what’s in the documents,” Mr. Biden said.

The Justice Department review is aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick
B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating Mr. Trump’s failure to return all of the sensitive documents
he kept at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Garland has been briefed on the inquiry, according to a person
familiar with the situation, though it is not clear if he has made a
decision.

The documents included briefing materials on foreign countries from Mr.
Biden’s time as vice president, two people familiar with the situation
said Tuesday. They asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

The papers were found on Nov. 2, and the National Archives retrieved them
the next morning. The White House waited to publicly acknowledge the
matter on Monday, in response to a CBS News report revealing what had
happened.

The discovery came a week before the midterm congressional elections, when
the news would have been a high-profile, last-minute development.

Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, said that the Biden team was being circumspect about its public discussion of the matter because the Justice Department is examining it.

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“This is an ongoing process under review by D.O.J., so we are going to be limited in what we can say at this time,” he said. “But we are committed
to doing this the right way, and we will provide further details when and
as appropriate.”

As the president met with officials from Mexico and Canada to discuss
trade and immigration, the newly installed House Republican majority in Washington seized on the story to kick off what is expected to be two
years of investigations of the Biden administration, with a far-reaching request by the Oversight Committee to the National Archives for
correspondence among the archives, the Justice Department and top Biden
aides.

The committee’s new chairman, Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, said the government had moved aggressively against Mr. Trump for
his possession of classified documents, but not Mr. Biden, who he said had “repeatedly kept classified materials in an insecure location for years”
but “never faced a raid.”

“Meanwhile, the F.B.I. conducted a raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-
Lago residence for the same violation,” Mr. Comer said.

The circumstances of the two cases are starkly different, however. Unlike
Mr. Trump, who resisted months of government requests to return the
material stored at Mar-a-Lago and failed to fully comply with a subpoena,
Mr. Biden’s team appears to have acted swiftly and in accordance with the
law, immediately summoning officials with the National Archives to
retrieve the files. The archives then alerted the Justice Department,
according to the White House.

The episode illustrated Mr. Biden’s difficulty extracting himself from political peril, even when buoyed by events like the Democrats’
unexpectedly strong showing in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans,
eager to move on from the rancor of their recent House leadership fight,
hope to spin the Biden documents case into an attack that sustains a
protracted congressional investigation that damages Mr. Biden and blunts
the impact of Mr. Trump’s troubles on the party.

Mr. Garland, whose time in office has been defined by his department’s investigations of Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the
Capitol and the documents case, assigned the preliminary phase of the
inquiry to John R. Lausch Jr., the U.S. attorney in Chicago. The pick was intended to blunt criticism that Mr. Garland was seeking to protect the Democratic president who appointed him.

But the inevitable comparison of the Trump documents case with the Biden
matter has put new pressure on Mr. Garland, who decided in November to
assign both Trump investigations to a special counsel, Jack Smith, to
avoid accusations of a political vendetta against the former president.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Garland appeared together at a state visit to Mexico
when news of the documents broke on Monday, but neither had any comment at
the time, and a department spokesman also refused to comment.

The White House said Mr. Biden’s lawyers found the documents in a locked closet, intermingled with personal papers as they were packing up boxes
from the office.

Mr. Biden and his aides had used the office from mid-2017 until the start
of the 2020 presidential campaign, and the lawyers were preparing to
vacate the space, the White House has said. The discovery was not in
response to any prior request from the archives, and there was no
indication that Mr. Biden or his team resisted efforts to recover any
sensitive documents.

When Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered the documents, they immediately
cleared the room and stopped looking at the files, according to a person briefed on their account of the incident. As a result, the Biden team does
not know how many classified documents had been in the closet and what all
of their contents were, according to the person, who asked for anonymity
to discuss sensitive information.

The National Archives was required to notify the Justice Department that classified material had been discovered in an unauthorized place, as it
did in January 2022 when it found 184 files marked as classified in 15
boxes of materials it retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

In that matter, the Justice Department eventually developed evidence that
Mr. Trump was still holding on to numerous other classified materials. It obtained a grand jury subpoena in May, leading his team to provide 38 additional such documents, at which time they falsely said that was all
there were.

After obtaining further evidence that Mr. Trump was still withholding documents, the F.B.I. obtained a judicial warrant to search Mar-a-Lago and found 103 more, along with thousands of other publicly owned but
unclassified documents and photographs. A federal judge is weighing
whether to hold Mr. Trump’s team in contempt for defying the May subpoena.

Mr. Garland assigned Mr. Lausch, a Trump appointee, to conduct a so-called initial investigation aimed at gathering facts and legal research in the
case of Mr. Biden to inform whether it would be appropriate to appoint a special counsel.

Mr. Biden said that his aides had cooperated fully with the National
Archives after informing them of what had been found.

He said his lawyers had advised him not to even ask what was in the files,
and said he hoped the inquiry “will be finished soon.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/us/politics/biden-documents-classified- foreign-countries.html

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