Notebooks President Biden used during his time as vice president that may reference classified information were among the material seized by the FBI during a search of his Delaware home last week, according to a report.
The notebooks include some of the 80-year-old president’s writings related to his official White House business, such as notes on diplomatic engagements during his time as Barack Obama’s vice president, according to NBC News.
While the notebooks themselves did not have classified markings, according to the report, some of Biden’s handwritten notes inside them may reference sensitive material.
A person familiar with the investigation told the news outlet that the president had a “large” collection of notebooks with handwritten notes on both personal and official subject matter, including his family life and his experiences or thoughts as vice president.
Because some of the notes related to official business at the White House, they could be subject to the Presidential Records Act and should have been handed over to the National Archives at the end of the Obama presidency.
The latest on President Biden’s classified docs scandal
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A person close to Biden told NBC News that it is implausible that Biden packed up the notebooks himself to be taken to his Wilmington home.
“He’s not putting anything in boxes,” the anonymous individual said.
The FBI conducted its unprecedented 13-hour-long search of the commander in chief’s 6,850-square-foot Wilmington mansion last week, finding six more documents marked classified, some dating back to Biden’s days as a senator.
White House counsel Ian Sams described the FBI’s hunt for documents as “a planned consensual search” in a call with reporters Monday.
The initial discovery of some 10 classified documents at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington, DC on Nov. 2 sparked the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of highly sensitive papers.
Before last Friday, the Justice Department decided against having FBI agents watch over searches of Biden’s Delaware homes in part because Biden’s attorneys were deemed to be cooperating with the DOJ’s investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former Maryland US Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel earlier this month to investigate how the classified documents ended up at Biden’s namesake think tank in Washington, DC, and his home in Delaware.
