Joe Biden's lawyers have discovered five additional pages marked classified, presidential counsel Richard Sauber has announced.
"Because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document the President's personal counsel found on Wednesday to the Justice Department. While I was transferring it to the [Department of Justice] officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classifications markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DoJ officials with me immediately took possession of them," Sauber said in a statement Saturday morning.
The attorney reiterated that the president's lawyers had "followed a process" of coordinating with the Archives Administration and the DoJ in their review of documents at the Penn Biden Center and President Biden's Delaware homes, and established a special procedure in combing the properties.
"The president's personal attorneys conducting the searches do not have active security clearances, so if they identified a document with a classified marking, they stopped and did not review it, and suspended any further search in that box, file or other specific space where the document was found, as appropriate. Since the DoJ made contact with the president's personal attorneys, the next step in the process was to notify DoJ and to arrange for DoJ to take possession of the document. This is what occurred in Wilmington on Wednesday when the president's attorneys discovered one document with a classified marking consisting of one page in a room adjacent to the garage. At that point, the president's personal attorneys stopped searching the immediate area where the document was found," Sauber said.
Sauber indicated that any further questions on the documents will be referred by his office to the Special Counsel's office, and promised that the White House would continue to cooperate with the Special Counsel moving forward.
President Biden confirmed to reporters Thursday that classified documents from his days as Barack Obama's vice president had been found in filing cabinets, a private library and a locked garage at his Wilmington, Delaware home. That's in addition to papers discovered in early November, but not reported on until last Monday, at the Penn Biden Center, a Washington-based think tank affiliated with the president. The files found at the think tank reportedly include intelligence reports relating to Ukraine, Iran and the UK, and are dated between 2013 and 2016.
The Justice Department named seasoned trial lawyer and former DoJ official Robert Hur as special counsel in the Biden document case, with Hur taking over the probe from John Lausch.
Prior to the discovery of the five additional pages, the total cache of documents marked classified and discovered at Biden haunts numbered about 20, with some labeled "top secret."
Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican Congressmen recently appointed chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has promised to get to the bottom of the president's alleged "mishandling" of the classified information, to watch over the DoJ's investigation, and figure out whether the department put its thumb on the scale for Biden by sitting on the classified documents until after the November midterms.
The House Oversight Committee has launched a separate probe, with Committee chairman James Comer expressing concerns that President Biden may have "compromised (intelligence) sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents."
The brewing scandal over the documents, which comes as Washington continues to reel from allegations that US intelligence ordered social media giant Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election, has given ample ammunition to the president's detractors from both the left and right, with former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden issuing a series of viral, sarcasm-laden tweets slamming Biden for his alleged indiscretion.
Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump, who faced months of attacks and threats of prosecution over his own scandal involving classified documents stashed away at his Florida estate, lashed out at US intelligence after the Biden scandal broke, asking whether the FBI was going to "raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House," as it had his Mar-a-Lago estate last August.
Liberal-leaning media have rushed to emphasize that the Biden and Trump classified documents scandal are not the same. Meanwhile, at least one Democratic Congressman has suggested the files found in Biden's home may have been planted by Republicans.
"Alleged classified documents showing up allegedly in the possession of Joseph Biden...I'm suspicious of the timing of it," Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia told media on Thursday. "I'm also aware of the fact that things can be planted on people...things can be planted in places and then discovered conveniently. That may be what has occurred here. I'm not ruling that out," Johnson said.