Documents classified as confidential from Joe Biden’s vice presidency (under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017) were found in the premises of a Washington think tank that the current president temporarily used as a workplace, the White House announced on Monday.
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Joe Biden’s attorneys discovered those documents in November when they emptied the premises and turned them over to the archives responsible for preserving these types of deeds, his legal adviser Richard Sauber said.
“The White House is cooperating with the national archives and the Department of Justice,” Sauber said in a statement.
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, he said.
“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.
According to the American media CBS News, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the Chicago federal attorney’s office to examine the documents, while the federal police (FBI) also launched an investigation.
Citing an anonymous source, CBS News points out that a dozen documents are affected and none contain nuclear secrets.
The FBI conducted a spectacular search of Donald Trump’s Florida residence in August to recover thousands of documents, including a hundred classified “defence” documents that the ex-president took with him after he left the White House and that he has held to date had 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.