Biden aides find more classified documents

Another batch of classified documents has been discovered by aides to US President Joe Biden, according to a published report.

NBC News, citing a person familiar with the matter, said that the documents were found at a different location from other documents that were discovered in November in an office Biden had used during his time with the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank in Washington. The discovery of those documents was first reported by CBS News on Monday.

The White House did not reply to a request for comment Wednesday, while the Justice Department had no comment, NBC reported.

News about the documents in Biden's possession came a few months after a similar situation related to former president Donald Trump's handling of classified documents. Following a monthslong dispute between Trump and the Department of Justice, FBI agents executed a search warrant in August of the former president's home Mar-a-Lago in Florida to gather any classified documents.

In November, US Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed prosecutor Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate whether Trump violated federal law when he took classified documents after leaving the White House in early 2021.

To review the discovery of the Biden classified documents, Garland appointed US Attorney John R. Lausch Jr of Chicago, who also served in the Trump administration.

The latest news elicited complaints by Republicans of a double standard in how the Trump and Biden document cases have been handled.

"Attorney General Merrick Garland must appoint a special counsel," US Representative Troy Nehls, a Texas Republican, tweeted in response to the latest report Wednesday.

US Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote on Twitter: "Look how President Trump was treated when it came to so-called ‘classified' documents at his home. Now look at how President Biden is being treated for having classified documents at the Biden Center."

Jordan also will head a new judiciary panel called the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which will aim to investigate whether government agencies have considered politics in their actions.

In a letter to Garland on Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, wrote: "Please provide a full explanation of the (Justice) Department's decision not to dispatch FBI agents to search the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement for classified documents dating back to the Obama Administration."

David Axelrod, a former strategist for former president Barack Obama, tweeted an image of a "get out of jail free" card from the board game Monopoly and wrote, "Story is much different but this is the image that flashed before Trump's eyes when [the Biden] docs story broke."

Biden worked with the Penn Biden Center after his second term as vice-president concluded in 2017.

The University of Pennsylvania had leased a suite of offices for the center in February 2018, including one for Biden's personal use when he was in Washington.

On Tuesday, while attending the North American Leaders' Summit in Mexico City, Biden said of the documents found in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center: "After I was briefed about the discovery, I was surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken to that office. But I don't know what's in the documents."

Of the November documents, Biden said his lawyers acted promptly by contacting the National Archives.

"They did what they should have done," the president said. "They immediately called the archive ... turned them over to the archives."

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked several times about the documents.

"At this time, I'm not going beyond what the president said yesterday," she said at a press briefing. "It's an ongoing process. We're going to respect the process."