Joe Biden Says Misplaced Classified Documents Resulted from Packing 'Not Done Well' by Staff
President Joe Biden is speaking about why he believes classified documents made their way to his Delaware home and Washington, D.C. office.
While appearing on PBS NewsHour Wednesday, Biden, 80, sat down for an interview with Judy Woodruff, where he seemingly blamed the misplaced documents on the workers who packed up his vice presidential office.
In the chat, Biden explained that he is not going to "prejudice the investigation that is going on" and said he allowed investigators to "voluntarily" search the key locations — something Woodruff, 76, pointed out differed from former president Donald Trump's handling of classified documents.
"No one's had to threaten to do anything. [I] voluntarily opened every single aperture I have in the house, offices, everything, for them to come and look and spend hours searching my home," he said. "I invited them."
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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Joe Biden
Then stating that to "the best of my knowledge, the kind of things they picked up were things from 1974 and stray papers," Biden continued, "There may be something else, I don't know."
"But one of the things that happened is, 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've been done to thoroughly go through every single piece of literature," he added.
The president said that looking ahead, he will wait to see what the results of the investigation from officials are.
"I'll just let the investigation, you know, decide what's going on, and we'll see what happens," he said on PBS NewsHour.
RELATED VIDEO: Biden 'Surprised To Learn' Classified Obama-Era Documents Were Found in Former D.C. Office
Classified documents were found at Biden's offices and at his Delaware home in recent weeks, leading Attorney General Merrick Garland to announce the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the storage of the documents.
Under the Presidential Records Act, presidential and vice-presidential records are the property of the federal government, with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) responsible for the "custody, control and preservation" of those materials once an administration ends.
Soon after Biden's ordeal, former vice president Mike Pence became the latest current or former top U.S. official found to have classified documents at his home. The documents were discovered at Pence's Indiana house and were handed over to the FBI by one of his attorneys, the Associated Press reported.
Previously, in August 2022, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., in an explosive moment in the ongoing criminal investigation into whether the former president violated statutes related to national security by allegedly mishandling classified documents he removed from the White House at the end of his presidency.
