The search of the US president’s Rehoboth, Delaware home was ‘planned’ with his full consent, lawyers said
The FBI has searched US President Joe Biden’s home in Rehoboth, Delaware as part of its ongoing probe into his unauthorized storage of classified material on his properties, Biden’s lawyer Bob Bauer revealed on Wednesday, stressing that the search was both “planned” and consensual.
Investigators did not require a search warrant because they were acting with the “full support” of the president, and the agency has not commented on the operation. Bauer explained that the public had not been notified ahead of time in order to maintain “operational security and integrity.”
It emerged on Tuesday that the FBI had searched Washington, DC think tank the Penn Biden Center in November after classified documents were discovered there just days before Americans voted in the 2022 midterms. Biden maintained an office at the center from 2017 to 2019, in between his stints in the White House. Neither the discovery nor the subsequent search were made public at the time.
More classified material was recovered from Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home in multiple searches conducted in December and January. Six classified documents, some dating back to his Senate career, turned up in the course of a 13-hour search of the property last month, and FBI agents confiscated a “large” number of his notebooks. The FBI returned for a more in-depth search after classified and top-secret material from his two terms as vice president under Barack Obama was found in his garage.
The November search of the Penn Biden Center was made public on Tuesday in a CBS report that revealed it was also conducted without a warrant and with the full consent of the president. In total, some 25 to 30 classified documents have been retrieved.
Special Counsel Robert Hur began overseeing the investigation into Biden’s possession of classified material on Tuesday. The National Archives put out a call to the six most recent presidential administrations last month, urging them to return any unauthorized papers after classified documents were found at former vice president Mike Pence’s home in Indiana. An FBI raid last year on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate – decried as a political stunt by the Republican presidential hopeful himself – uncovered a trove of classified documents which Trump claimed to have declassified himself.
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