President Joe Biden shifted blame to the alleged mishandling of classified documents from before he was president, saying his staff did not pack up his office correctly.
“One of the things that happened is — that what was not done well is — as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there,” Biden said Wednesday in an interview with PBS.
The president reiterated that his team has been cooperating with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and had invited the FBI to search his Delaware residence two times in search of more documents. He has said he was “surprised” to find out that classified documents were discovered at his home and at the Penn Biden Center, his Washington, D.C., think tank. (RELATED: DOJ Discovers Six More Biden Classified Documents)
US President Joe Biden boards Air Force One before departing Dane County Regional Airport in Madison, Wisconsin on February 8, 2023. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Biden also offered insight into what the DOJ may have recovered from his Delaware residence. The White House Counsel has not told the public what kinds of documents were recovered in their Jan. 20 search, other than “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.”
“In the best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up were things that [were] from 1974 and stray papers. There may be something else, I don’t know,” Biden said in the interview.
Biden’s lawyers discovered classified documents at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2. More documents were discovered on Dec. 20, Jan. 11 and Jan. 12 by his lawyers, and on Jan. 20 by the DOJ at his Delaware residence. The DOJ conducted another search on Feb. 1, but no additional documents were found.