The American president assures that it was his lawyers who discovered the documents of his vice presidency and immediately contacted the archives.
Joe Biden said he was unaware of the contents of confidential documents from his vice presidency under Barack Obama (2009-2017) that were found in one of the offices he sometimes used as a workplace. “I was informed of the discovery and was surprised to learn that government-related documents had been brought to this office. But I don’t know what the documents say,” the US President told reporters Tuesday, January 10, after a summit with the Mexican President and the Prime Minister of Canada in Mexico City.
His lawyers will “fully cooperate” in reviewing these documents, he said. The documents were found “when my attorneys were cleaning up my office at the University of Pennsylvania,” Joe Biden said. Once the attorneys determined some were confidential, “they did what they had to do, they called the archives” to turn them over, according to the president.
A “low number of documents classified as confidential”
This “small number of classified documents” were found in a “locked cabinet” at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, Presidential Counsel Richard Sauber said Monday. “The documents were not the subject of any prior inquiry or inquiry,” and since their delivery to the archives, Joe Biden’s attorneys have continued to work together to “ensure that the archives in their possession are from all archives of the Obama-Biden administration, ” he added.
The FBI conducted a spectacular search of Donald Trump’s Florida residence in August to recover thousands of documents, including hundreds of top-secret defense secrets, that the ex-president took with him after he left the White House and that he had by then refused to return to the archive. According to press reports, the confidential documents seized at his Mar-a-Lago club contained, in particular, sensitive information about China and Iran, as well as nuclear secrets. “When will the FBI search Joe Biden’s many homes or even the White House?” Donald Trump replied in a statement.