The revelation comes days after an attorney for Biden said the president’s lawyers had discovered a “small number” of classified documents at his former office space in Washington.
Earlier this week, the White House confirmed that the Department of Justice was reviewing “a small number of documents with classified markings” found at the office.
Biden’s attorneys found those documents at the offices of the Penn Biden Center and immediately called the National Archives about the discovery, the White House said. Biden had kept an office there after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, until shortly before he launched his Democratic presidential campaign in 2019.
The person who spoke to the AP on Wednesday said the president’s legal team had found additional classified material at a second location. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the sensitive matter. The person did not say when or where the materials were found or disclose specific details about their classification level.
The revelation that additional classified documents had been uncovered came hours after White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden’s handling of classified information and the West Wing’s management of the discovery.
She said the White House was committed to handling the matter in the “right way,” pointing to Biden’s personal attorneys’ immediate notification of the National Archives.
But she would not say when Biden had been briefed, whether there were potentially more classified documents at other unauthorized locations, or why the White House waited more than two months to reveal the discovery of the initial batch of documents, which were found Nov. 2, days before the midterm election.
“As my colleagues in the counsel have stated and said to all of you yesterday, this is an ongoing process under the review of the Department of Justice. So we are going to be limited on what we can say here,” Jean-Pierre said.
The White House and Justice Department declined to comment Wednesday on reports of the second set of classified records, first reported by NBC News.
The Justice Department is reviewing the records that were found at the Penn Biden Center, and Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland has asked John Lausch, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to review the the matter, another person familiar with the matter told the AP this week. That person also was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Lausch is one of the few U.S. attorneys to be held over from former President Trump’s administration.
Irrespective of the Justice Department review, the revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records could prove to be a political headache for the president, who called Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida “irresponsible.”
Biden has said that he was “surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken there to that office,” but that his lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately called the National Archives.
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has requested that the U.S. intelligence community conduct a “damage assessment” of potentially classified documents.
The revelation also may complicate the Justice Department’s consideration of whether to bring charges against Trump, a Republican who is trying to win back the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed the department’s inquiry into his own conduct amounted to “corruption.”
There are significant differences between the Trump and Biden situations, including the gravity of an ongoing grand jury investigation into the Mar-a-Lago matter.