The US Department of Justice seized several documents with confidential information in new searches carried out on Friday at the US President’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, Joe Biden’s lawyer revealed on Saturday.
According to Bob Bauer, quoted by the Associated Press agency, authorities seized “materials consistent with the investigation, including six consisting of documents with confidentiality marks and other related materials.”
Some of the seized documents relate to Joe Biden’s time in the US Senate and others to his time as vice president in the administration of Barack Obama, said the lawyer.
The searches lasted 13 hours at the residence in Wilmington, Delaware.
A week ago, the White House disclosed that Biden’s lawyers had found confidential documents and official records on four separate occasions: on Nov. 2 at the Penn Biden Center offices in Washington, on Dec. 1 in Delaware, and on Nov. 11 and 12 in the library of the head of state’s residence.
The new searches took place a day after Joe Biden devalued the controversy, ensuring that he was not sorry and that there was no case.
The discovery of confidential documents, dating from Biden’s vice presidency (2009-2017), complicates a federal investigation into former President Donald Trump, who, according to the Justice Department, took hundreds of records marked as confidential with him when he left the White House in early 2021 and resisted requests for months to return them to the country’s Archives.
While the two cases are different—Biden, for example, voluntarily turned over the documents found—it has still become a political headache for a president who has promised a complete break with the operations and methods of the Trump administration.
The case also complicates the last two years of Biden’s term ahead of the 2024 presidential election, in which he has not yet confirmed whether he will run.
