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President Joe Biden’s presidency is starting to appear to be more in jeopardy than ever before as another set of classified documents has been found at his Delaware residence.
The president’s special counsel Richard Sauber, not to be confused with the special counsel that is investigating the classified documents scandal, issued a statement on the matter on Saturday.
“President Biden’s personal attorneys have followed a process, coordinated with the Archives and the Department of Justice, to review documents at the Penn Biden Center and the President’s Delaware residences. 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 personal 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,” the special counsel said.
“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 DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them,” he said.
“The President’s lawyers have acted immediately and voluntarily to provide the Penn Biden documents to the Archives and the Wilmington documents to DOJ. We have now publicly released specific details about the documents identified, how they were identified, and where they were found. The appointment of the Special Counsel in this matter this week means we will now refer specific questions to the Special Counsel’s office moving forward. As I said Thursday, the White House will cooperate with the newly-appointed Special Counsel,” he said.
It has been frustrating for the White House to deal with the scandal.
Multiple aides who worked for Biden towards the end of the Obama administration have been questions by federal law enforcement officials, NBC News reported.
“Kathy Chung, who was Biden’s executive assistant while he was vice president and helped pack up his vice presidential office in January 2017, is among those who have been interviewed, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing inquiry. Chung currently serves as deputy director of protocol for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin,” the report said.
A source familiar with the interviews said that the feds asked for the interviews to be compiled “quickly.”
“The people who were boxing [up the vice presidential office] had no idea that there was anything in there that shouldn’t leave the White House,” they said. “There was no decision made to take certain documents that should have been presidential records or classified.”
The sources did not know whether all interviews of the aides were complete. It is possible that the newly named special counsel could interview them again. Some of the aides who were with Biden while he was vice president are now White House staff members.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Chung and the other aides being interviewed.
Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder referred all questions about Chung’s interview to the Department of Justice.
Federal investigators’ decision to interview staff from Biden’s vice presidential office followed the discovery in November of fewer than a dozen classified documents as they packed up his office space at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington.
