President Biden is facing a Department of Justice investigation after his lawyers found classified documents at his Delaware residence and an office in Washington, D.C.
They were found in multiple instances, with a White House lawyer announcing on Saturday that five more pages had been found at Biden’s home.
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former Justice Department official Robert Hur to lead the DOJ probe.
“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said Thursday.
The announcement came just a few days after news broke that classified documents had been found at Biden’s private office less than a week before the midterm elections in November — a discovery that led the DOJ to launch an initial inquiry.
A special counsel will probe government documents at Biden’s home and private office
LAW
A special counsel will probe government documents at Biden’s home and private office
The White House has said it has cooperated with the DOJ during its review and plans to continue working with Hur’s special counsel investigation.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” said Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer, in a statement.
Here’s what we know about the Biden documents so far:
On four occasions, classified documents were found at Biden’s private residence and a D.C. office he used before becoming president.
Early last November, Biden’s personal lawyers were packing files from an office he had in Washington for his work at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think-tank founded by the University of Pennsylvania.
There, in a “locked closet,” the White House said, they discovered some classified files that should not have been there. The documents were turned over to the National Archives.
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Then, on Nov. 4, the National Archives inspector general informed the Department of Justice of the discovery. By mid-November, Garland had tapped John Lausch, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Chicago, to oversee an assessment of the materials.
On Dec. 20, Biden’s personal counsel Robert Bauer informed Lausch that another set of documents had been found that day in the garage of Biden’s private home in Wilmington, Del. Those documents were soon secured by the FBI.
On Jan. 11 — two days after CBS News broke a story about the documents — Biden’s personal attorneys searched his homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach. They found one classified document at Biden’s Wilmington home.
On Thursday, the White House described the review as being over. “The search is complete,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
But on Saturday, Sauber, the White House lawyer, said he had found five more pages at Biden’s Wilmington home on Thursday when he was working with DOJ officials to hand over what he had days earlier described as one final page of classified material.
