WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House said on Monday that a search by the Justice Department of President Joe Biden’s home on Friday was carried out after a “voluntary, proactive offer” by his personal lawyers to the department.
A new search of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, by the department found six more items, including documents with classification markings, a lawyer for the president said in a statement on Saturday night.
Some of the classified documents and “surrounding materials” dated from Biden’s tenure in the U.S. Senate, where he represented Delaware from 1973 to 2009, according to his lawyer, Bob Bauer. Other documents were from his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration, from 2009 through 2017, Bauer said.
“This was a voluntary, proactive offer by the president’s personal lawyers to DOJ to have access to the home,” said White House spokesman Ian Sams.
Sams declined to provide more clarity on the exact content of the materials taken from the Wilmington house. Biden had been kept informed throughout this process, the White House said.
The search increases the legal and political stakes for Biden, who has insisted that the previous discovery of classified material at his home and former office would eventually be deemed inconsequential.
Sams also said the White House counsel has sent a letter to the Chairman of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Oversight Committee in response to his inquiries about the classified documents found at Democrat Biden’s home and office.
Republicans have compared the investigation to an investigation into how Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, a Republican, handled classified documents after he left office in January 2021.
The White House has said Biden’s team has cooperated with authorities in their investigation of documents and turned them over. Trump resisted doing so until an FBI search in August at his Florida resort.
(Reporting by Steve Holland, Nandita Bose and Jarrett Renshaw in Washington; Editing by Grant McCool)
