Joe Biden, in Washington this Wednesday JONATHAN ERNST (Portal)
After discovering in November in the Washington office a stack of classified documents used by Joe Biden between the end of his tenure as vice president to Barack Obama (2017) and the start of the campaign that took him to the White House in 2020, an A A team of the Democratic leader’s associates began searching other of his workplaces in search of more papers. This Wednesday, the NBC television network, citing anonymous sources, published the discovery of a second set of documents that were kept at a location other than the current president’s office in the federal capital.
Little is known about this new block of papers. The level of secrecy protecting them, number and exact location were not disclosed. He also doesn’t know how his discovery came about, or if the search for other classified material Biden might keep from the Obama administration days has ended with this discovery.
Biden’s week began with news, relayed by CBS, of the existence of a dozen classified documents in a closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, a private office of the president in downtown Washington. The papers were made available to the National Archives and the case was reported to the Department of Justice. Among them are memoranda from the US secret services and material on sensitive geopolitical relations such as Washington’s with Ukraine, Iran or the United Kingdom. US law requires that records of the President be preserved and made available to the National Archives after he leaves office.
The discovery was immediately cast in the unfavorable light of the outrage Biden had shown when the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Fla., over the summer, where the former president took away a much larger quantity of, yes, papers that leave the white house In an interview for 60 Minutes, which aired last September, Biden said: “How is that possible? How can someone be so irresponsible? [Al saber de su existencia] I thought: What data was there that could compromise the sources and methods? I mean the names of the people who helped… It’s just… it’s totally irresponsible.”
On Tuesday, Biden spoke about the first find during an official visit to Mexico City to meet his Canadian counterparts Justin Trudeau and Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He said he was “surprised” to learn that a cupboard in an office contained documents from the period for personal use. He assured that confidential information would be taken seriously and that he was not aware of the content of these documents.
“They found some documents in a box, in a locked cupboard, and as soon as they did, they found that there were several secret documents in that box. And they did what they had to do: call the archives immediately [Nacionales] and hand them over. I was informed of this discovery and was surprised to learn that there are government documents that were brought to this office, but I do not know what the documents say,” added the US President. “My lawyers delivered the boxes to the archives [Nacionales], and we fully cooperate with the review. I hope it ends soon and it’s time to give more details.
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe to
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.