President Joe Biden rounded on his former staffers Wednesday when he blamed them for not being thorough enough in packing up his old offices, saying it was their carelessness that resulted in multiple classified documents being discovered in the garage at his Delaware home.
“One of the things that happened is that 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 have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there,” Biden told PBS NewsHour in a post-State of the Union address interview.
The Hill reports he also said he thinks investigators may have “picked up” items from 50 years ago. Biden did not elaborate on whether those items were classified documents.
A television displays U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s remarks during a news conference to announce the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate the discovery of classified documents held by President Joe Biden at an office and his home on January 12, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“To the best of my knowledge, the kind of things they picked up are things, they’re from 1974, stray papers. There may be something else. I don’t know,” Biden said.
Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972, also told PBS he voluntarily allowed the FBI to “come and look and spend hours searching my home. I invited them.”
Former and current Biden administration officials previously blamed the National Archives for mishandling the classified documents found stashed in three separate locations.
As Breitbart News reported, Richard Sauber, a special counsel for Biden, confirmed in a statement after the initial discoveries back in January that “a small number” of records with classified markings were discovered from his time as vice president.
“All but one of these documents were found in storage space in the President’s Wilmington residence garage,” he said. “One document consisting of one page was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room.”