At Biden’s house, six more secret documents gets seized

• The US Department of Justice (DoJ) searched Joe Biden’s Delaware home.
• Secret documents spanning both his time as a senator and as Barack Obama’s vice president were found.
• DoJ also took away “personally handwritten notes,” Mr. Biden’s lawyer said.
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On Friday, documents spanning both his time as a senator and his time as as Barack Obama’s vice president were found on the Wilmington home.

Lawyer Bob Bauer said “personally handwritten notes” and “surrounding materials” were also taken away.

Mr. Biden wasn’t there, nor was his wife.

The president offered access “to his home to allow DoJ to conduct a search of the entire premises for potential vice-presidential records and potential classified material”, Mr. Bauer said in a statement on Saturday.

For allegedly handling secret data improperly, former president Donald Trump is under criminal investigation.

The Penn Biden Center, a think tank the president created in Washington, DC, was the location of the initial batch of secret information, according to Mr. Biden’s attorneys earlier this month.

According to his attorneys, a second set of documents were discovered on December 20 in the garage of his Wilmington home, and a third one was discovered on January 12 in a storage area.

The president said that as soon as they discovered the records, his team quickly turned them over to the Justice Department and the National Archives. Why Mr. Biden preserved them is unknown.

The Presidential Records Act stipulates that after an administration ends, White House records must be transferred to the National Archives, where they can be safely stored.

Robert Hur has been designated as a special counsel to oversee the enquiry into how the confidential materials were handled.

As he gets ready to announce whether he would run for a second term in 2024, the president finds the protracted search and subsequent discovery of additional documents to be a political issue.

According to media, the two-month delay between the first Biden discovery, which occurred just before the midterm elections, and the news becoming public in January poses uncomfortable issues for the president about transparency.

The team for Mr. Biden maintains that the president gave the DoJ investigation his full cooperation. The incident has been downplayed by Mr. Biden as an oversight, and he claims he has “no remorse” about holding off on making the finding of some secret documents public until after the November midterm elections.

The finding comes at the same time as former US President Donald Trump is under investigation for allegedly mishandling hundreds of confidential documents at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate and for allegedly failing to appear as ordered.

Prior to the FBI raiding Mr. Trump’s Florida vacation property in August of last year, he and his attorneys delayed turning over the records. He asserts that the FBI is treating President Biden more kindly.

At the time, President Biden called Mr. Trump’s handling of the materials “extremely reckless.”

Legal experts have disputed Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had the authority to declassify them despite the fact that he has not provided any explanation for why they are there.

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