OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Federal authorities removed a total of nine boxes filled with documents from an office belonging to an attorney for President Joe Biden, according to a late Wednesday report.
Fox News noted exclusively that the documents were removed from “Biden’s attorney Patrick Moore’s Boston office, but have yet to be reviewed, the National Archives disclosed in a response letter to Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, this week.”
Prior to this, The Archives had not made public the quantity of boxes that were taken from Boston. It was previously reported that Moore had transported boxes containing documents from the Penn Biden Center to his Boston workplace before uncovering the first batch of classified documents at the think tank in Washington, D.C., Fox News added.
Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall replied to queries from Johnson and Grassley in a letter dated February 24th, regarding the archives’ knowledge of when and how the records were taken to Boston. She stated that the agency became aware of it on November 3rd, 2022, the outlet said.
“When NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] contacted President Biden’s personal counsel on November 3, 2022, to arrange to pick up boxes from the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., they informed NARA that Mr. Moore had moved other boxes from the Penn Biden Center to Mr. Moore’s law firm in Boston,” the letter said, according to the report.
Furthermore, The Archives informed the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General on November 4th that the documents had been relocated. On November 9th, the documents were retrieved and safeguarded at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, the report said.
“NARA staff retrieved nine boxes from Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” Wall continued, which had not previously been reported.
Although The Archives has held the documents since November, they have not yet examined the contents of the boxes to ascertain whether they contain any more classified materials, Fox News added.
“NARA has not reviewed the contents of the boxes found at Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” Wall said in the letter, which was dated Tuesday.
It was previously reported that in mid-November, FBI agents searched the offices of the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., following the discovery of a few documents marked as classified there on November 2nd by Biden’s personal lawyers.
More classified documents were subsequently found in Biden’s garage at his Wilmington, Del., home.
In mid-January, the Department of Justice announced that officials were considering searching more locations for classified documents after finding sensitive materials in the garage, CBS News reported.
“Justice Department officials are also considering the possibility of conducting other consensual searches at locations linked to Mr. Biden, said the source familiar with the investigation,” the report said.
“DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years,” said an attorney for Biden at the time.
The search was conducted over a 12-hour period with the approval of the president’s attorneys, unlike the raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, CNN reported, adding.
Earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. Wray claimed that there was no bias and that Biden didn’t get special treatment – something many conservatives do not believe to be true.
“So, we have a long history of handling investigations into the mishandling of classified information. And our standard for approaching those investigations is the same, no matter who it is,” he told Baier.
“Our basic approach is the same. Now, that approach means that we typically start with the least intrusive means to try to retrieve the improperly stored classified information. But if those less intrusive means don’t work, and certainly if they are frustrated in some way, then we adapt and turn to other legal tools that we have been entrusted with,” he added.
