FBI searches Biden’s Wilmington home and finds more classified materials

By Betsy Klein and Jeremy Herb, CNN

FBI investigators on Friday found additional classified material after conducting a search of President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home, the president’s personal attorney said in a statement.

Bob Bauer said that during the search, which took place over nearly 12 hours Friday, “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.”

Those six items are in addition to materials previously found at Biden’s Wilmington residence and in his private office.

The FBI did a search of the Biden’s Wilmington property with consent of the president’s attorneys, people briefed on the matter said. The FBI also previously picked up documents found at the residence, which the Biden team disclosed last week.

Bauer said that representatives of Biden’s personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office were present during the “thorough search,” during which they had “full access” to the Biden home.

Bauer added that the DOJ “requested that the search not be made public in advance, in accordance with its standard procedures, and we agreed to cooperate.”

The FBI’s search of Biden’s home shows that federal investigators are swiftly moving forward with the probe into classified documents found in Biden’s possession. Special counsel Robert Hur, who was appointed a little more than a week ago, is investigating how the president and his team handled Obama-era classified documents that were recently found in Biden’s private possession. The first documents were found in Biden’s private office on November 2 but not publicly revealed until earlier this month when CBS first reported their existence.

Since then, other classified documents were found at Biden’s home in Wilmington by the president’s attorneys, where Friday’s search took place. Bauer said in a January 11 statement that once Biden’s personal attorneys found the classified documents, they left the document where it was found and suspended their search of the space where it was located.

Neither Biden nor first lady Dr. Jill Biden were present during the search, special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said in a statement.

Biden, Sauber wrote, “has been committed to handling this responsibly because he takes this seriously” and he and his team are “working swiftly to ensure DOJ and the Special Counsel have what they need to conduct a thorough review.”

Biden is spending this weekend at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home. Asked Friday by the Associated Press if the visit had anything to do with documents being found at Biden’s Wilmington home, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred reporters to White House counsel’s office and the Department of Justice, but said that Biden “often travels to Delaware on the weekends.”

The FBI’s search of Biden’s home comes five months after the FBI obtained a search warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. That search, however, occurred because federal investigators had evidence suggesting Trump had not handed over all classified materials in his possession after receiving a subpoena to turn over classified documents to the National Archives.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.

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