US media: Former President Trump has not settled the turmoil in storing "confidential" documents, and now Biden also "smoothed" a number of confidential documents during his tenure as vice president, which alarmed the FBI
CBS official website reported on January 9: Two people familiar with the matter told CBS News that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned U.S. attorneys in Chicago to review matters marked as "confidential" in the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Pennsylvania. About 10 such documents were found in President Biden's office in downtown Washington, D.C., when he was vice president (Figure 3), the sources said. CBS News has learned that the FBI is also involved in the investigation.
Special Adviser to the President, Richard Sauber, confirmed that Biden's personal lawyer confirmed the materials on November 2, just before the midterm elections. In a statement to CBS News, Mr. Sauber said Mr. Biden's personal attorney "was packing the documents in a locked closet to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Penn Penn," when he found them.
The sources said the documents were stored in a folder and the folder was placed in a box with other unclassified documents. The source did not disclose either the content of the document or its classification level. A source familiar told CBS News The documents did not contain nuclear secrets.
Sauber also said that on the day the materials were found, Nov. 2, the White House counsel's office notified the National Archives, which received the documents the next morning. According to people familiar with the matter, representatives of the National Archives immediately notified the U.S. Department of Justice.
Garland assigned John Lausch, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to investigate how materials marked as "classified" got to the Biden Center in Pennsylvania, the report said. The investigation is at a preliminary stage and the Minister of Justice will decide whether further investigation is required, including the possible appointment of a special counsel.
Rausch was nominated by former President Donald Trump to be a U.S. prosecutor, and he is one of two Trump-era U.S. prosecutors still in office. The other is Delaware Attorney David Weiss, who is currently leading the investigation into the president's son, Hunter Biden.
The Penn Biden Center is a think tank about a mile from the White House in Washington, D.C., affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and named after the current president, Joe Biden. The Presidential Records Act requires all presidential and vice presidential documents to be transferred to the National Archives and has special agreements to protect classified information.
Biden learned of the existence of the documents last November when President Biden's lawyers reported the documents to the White House lawyer's office. A person familiar with the matter said that "the president does not know the contents of the document." The documents are believed to be kept in a safe location in Washington. What prosecutor Rausch has to do is to examine to some extent how the documents got from Biden's vice president's office to the Biden Center in Pennsylvania.
Neither the Biden Center in Pennsylvania nor the University of Pennsylvania responded to requests for comment. The National Archives also declined to comment. Robert Lenhard, James Garland and Dana Remus, the lawyers who oversee Vice President Biden's records, similarly did not respond to voice messages or emails seeking comment. The Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment.
A person familiar with the matter said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "understands that the Justice Department is investigating the matter," but declined to comment.
Kevin McCarthy, the newly elected Republican House Speaker of Congress, said it was "very worrying" to find that Biden had classified documents while he was vice president. He said, "He has these classified documents, so how should he explain it to another president who has classified documents?" Asked if "the situation was different" because the lawyers found the documents and handed over the materials "immediately," McCarthy replied, "Oh, really?" After all these years, they have just discovered the documents."
According to reports, the Biden Center in Pennsylvania has provided a foothold for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in the capital of the United States. Established in 2018, the Center hosts academic programs and events focused on studying foreign policy. Biden began using office space in mid-2017 until he announced his candidacy for president in the spring of 2019.
The original title of the report was "U.S. attorney reviewing documents marked classified from Joe Biden's vice presidency found at Biden think tank."
