Second Set of Classified Documents Were Found at Biden’s Wilmington Home, White House Says

WASHINGTON — The White House said on Thursday that President Biden’s team discovered a second set of classified documents from his time as vice president at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Del.

The revelation on Wednesday that another batch had been found at a second location associated with Mr. Biden left unclear where the documents had been recovered. It was the second such disclosure this week, but did not answer fundamental questions about the contents of the documents, who packed them and whether the president or his top advisers had read them after he left office.

Richard Sauber, a special counsel to Mr. Biden, said in a statement on Wednesday that the second set of classified documents had been uncovered after the White House acknowledged this week that an earlier batch had been found in the closet of an office at a Washington think tank.

“During the review, the lawyers discovered among personal and political papers a small number of additional Obama-Biden administration records with classified markings,” Mr. Sauber said. “All but one of these documents were found in storage space in the President’s Wilmington residence garage. One document consisting of one page was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room.”

The statement said that the Biden team immediately notified the Justice Department and arranged for it to take possession of the documents.

Mr. Sauber said Mr. Biden’s team had also searched a house owned by the president in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but found no documents stored there.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden told reporters in Mexico City that he was “surprised” to learn in the fall that his lawyers found classified government documents in his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

He said his staff had fully cooperated with the National Archives and the Justice Department, but made no mention of the documents later found in Delaware.

Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said on Monday, prompting the Justice Department to scrutinize the situation to determine how to proceed.

The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.

The first batch of documents found in Mr. Biden’s former office were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2, when they were packing files at the Washington office, according to the White House.

Officials did not describe precisely how many documents were involved, what kind of information they included or their level of classification, and Mr. Biden’s lawyers provided no details about the content of the material found in the new batch.