Biden blames classified documents on poorly packed-up offices

President Biden on Wednesday blamed staffers who weren’t thorough enough in packing up his old offices for the multiple classified documents found from his time as vice president.  

“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 an interview the day after he delivered the State of the Union address. 

He also said he thinks investigators may have “picked up” items from 50 years ago. Biden did not say whether those items were classified documents.

“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.

When investigators searched Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home on Jan. 21, the president’s personal attorney Bob Bauer said the Justice Department took possession of “six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President.”

Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972. 

Most reporting on the documents taken from Biden’s Wilmington-area home and an office he used at the Penn Biden Center in Washington has focused on classified materials that came from his time as vice president.

The president added in the PBS interview, “I’ll let the investigation decide what’s go on, and we’ll see what happens.” 

The White House has stressed that the president has been cooperative with investigators and transparent about the discovery of documents over the last three weeks. 

Biden also told PBS that he voluntarily allowed the FBI to “come and look and spend hours searching my home. I invited them.” 

Just a week ago, federal investigators searched Biden’s Rehoboth Beach, Del., home and found no documents with classified markings. The search was conducted as part of a Justice Department investigation into how classified materials ended up at his Wilmington-area home and the old Washington office.