FBI Search of Biden Beach House Finds No Classified Documents

REHOBOTH, Del. — The FBI found no classified documents during a search of President Joe Biden’s family vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Wednesday, but investigators removed some material, including handwritten notes apparently from his time as vice president, Biden’s personal lawyer said.

The search was the third of its kind at a property associated with the president as part of an investigation into whether Biden mishandled government records, including classified documents found at two locations: his primary home in Wilmington, Delaware, and a Washington, D.C., office he used before becoming president.

The inquiry, now led by a Justice Department special counsel, into how classified material ended up at those properties is being conducted alongside a similar investigation into former President Donald Trump. He is accused of inappropriately taking classified information to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, when he left office in 2021.

The two cases are different, however. Trump has fought the inquiry, forcing the FBI to conduct a surprise raid of his property, while Biden and his lawyers have willingly surrendered documents they discovered on their own and have invited investigators into his homes to look for themselves.

But people familiar with Biden’s reaction to the steady drumbeat of revelations about the classified documents said he has become angry and frustrated by the situation, in particular by the comparison with Trump.

As a candidate, Biden explicitly ran as the antithesis of Trump’s norm-busting conduct and his willingness to interfere in Justice Department investigations. Now, the very suggestion that some people might think Biden is in the same league as Trump has left the president fuming, said several people, who asked for anonymity to discuss the president’s reaction.

During the first two years of Biden’s time in office, White House officials, and the president himself, have generally refrained from directly mentioning Trump, believing that doing so would merely elevate the former president.

But Biden has sharply criticized Trump’s mishandling of classified files at his residence in Florida, and the president’s lawyers have repeatedly insisted that the differences in how the two men responded to the discovery of classified documents is significant.

For the White House, the documents inquiry has become a distraction just as the president is trying to draw the public’s attention to his accomplishments and is widely expected to announce that he is running for reelection.

House Republicans have seized on the discovery of Biden’s documents as political ammunition against the president (even as they largely ignore or play down the discovery of a much larger cache of documents in Trump’s possession.) Questions about Biden’s documents have dominated recent press briefings.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed repeatedly on the topic by reporters Wednesday, and referred questions to the White House Counsel’s Office, saying that “when it relates to the DOJ, when it relates to the special counsel, this is something that’s been under their purview, so I would refer you to them.”

Ian Sams, a spokesperson for that office, took questions from reporters for about 10 minutes, and referred many questions about the investigation to the Justice Department.

“We’ve been following the Justice Department’s lead in coordinating these searches with them, and so if you want to ask granular questions about the decision-making, about the search, or the timing or anything like that, I’m referring to the Justice Department,” he said.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

The search of Biden’s home in Rehoboth began Wednesday morning.

Agents spent about 3 1/2 hours at the president’s slate-blue house, according to Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal lawyer, who said the search had been undertaken with the full cooperation of the president and his legal team.

“Under DOJ’s standard procedures, in the interests of operational security and integrity, it sought to do this work without advance public notice, and we agreed to cooperate,” Bauer said in a statement.

“Consistent with the process in Wilmington, the DOJ took for further review some materials and handwritten notes that appear to relate to his time as vice president,” Bauer wrote.

About an hour after agents rumbled off, the exclusive Rehoboth Beach neighborhood that serves as the Bidens’ summer getaway compound emptied out, except for a stray news van, a few year-rounders walking their dogs and a work crew noisily repairing an unoccupied home.

On Tuesday, news media outlets, including The New York Times, reported that the FBI had conducted a similar search at a Washington think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, in mid-November after the president’s aides discovered a small cache of classified documents there that month. The aides had been cleaning out the office that Biden used when he left the vice presidency.

Biden’s lawyers have said they cooperated fully with the National Archives and the Justice Department from the moment the documents were first discovered.

That cooperation stands in stark contrast to the actions of Trump and his lawyers, who repeatedly refused to cooperate with the Justice Department after the National Archives indicated that documents were missing. The FBI subpoenaed material and obtained a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.

White House officials did not reveal to the public that they had found the initial batch of classified documents for 68 days. They also waited several days to publicly disclose that additional documents had been found at the president’s home in Wilmington.

Those delays have prompted criticism from Republicans, who have accused the president of failing to be transparent about the documents. Days after the discoveries were made public, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the president’s handling of the material. In recent weeks, former Vice President Mike Pence also revealed the discovery of a handful of classified documents at his home in Indiana and returned them to the National Archives. It is not clear whether the Justice Department is also investigating Pence.

In Biden’s case, neither the Justice Department nor the president’s legal advisers have revealed details about the classified documents that were found.

The president and his lawyers have said they believe the mishandling of the documents will turn out to have been an inadvertent mistake that happened as Biden’s offices were being packed up at the end of his eight years as vice president.

“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there,” Biden told reporters last week. “I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It’s exactly what we’re doing.”