WASHINGTON D.C.: Five additional pages of classified material have been found at Joe Biden’s family home in Delaware, the White House said Saturday in a new twist in a politically sensitive affair for the president.
These pages, dating from Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s vice president, were found after White House lawyer Richard Sauber visited the home Thursday, he said in a statement.
Sauber said he made the trip to oversee the transfer to the Justice Department of a first batch of documents found on Wednesday.
Presidential lawyers searching the garage at the Delaware home found a document marked classified in the garage.
As these attorneys lacked the necessary security clearance to read it, they notified the Justice Department, Sauber said.
A 1978 law obliges US presidents and vice presidents to hand over their emails, letters and other official documents to the National Archives.
Sauber said he does have the necessary security clearance so he went to the Delaware house and, in transferring the earlier documents to Justice Department officials, found the other five pages.
Others papers had been found earlier at Biden’s former office at a Washington think tank.
Amid rising furor over the discoveries in Washington, US Attorney General Merrick Garland named an independent prosecutor to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The issue is an unwelcome distraction for Biden as he prepares to announce whether he will seek a second term.
The disclosures have prompted comparisons to the case, also being investigated by a special counsel, of former president Donald Trump’s possession of hundreds of classified materials at his Florida home and his alleged obstruction of government efforts to get them back.
“I take classified documents and classified material seriously. We’re cooperating fully (and) completely with the Justice Department’s review,” Biden told reporters Thursday.
“As part of that process, my lawyers reviewed other places where documents from my time as vice president were stored, and they finished the review last night.”
The first cache of Biden documents was discovered in November, a week before last year’s midterm elections but only acknowledged by the White House on Monday, prompting accusations from Republicans that it was kept secret for political reasons.
More classified documents found at President Biden home in Delaware: White House
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More classified documents found at President Biden home in Delaware: White House
- Presidential lawyers searching the garage at the Delaware home found a document marked classified in the garage
Italian general challenges Meloni from the right
- A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down”
- Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections
ROME: A retired general who criticizes the EU, wants to send home illegal migrants and says Ukraine should accept a peace deal with Russia is challenging Italy’s hard-right government on its own turf.
Roberto Vannacci, 57, last month defected from the far-right League party, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government, and set up a new party he said is “proud of being right-wing.”
Opinion polls put the new “National Future” at around three percent support, most of it taken from the League, led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, but also Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy.
Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections.
But the general offers “the first movement emerging on the right that isn’t aligned with the three main parties,” Lorenzo Castellani, professor of politics at Rome’s Luiss University, said.
A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down.”
In it, he complained about a “dictatorship of minorities,” while saying Italian star volleyball player Paola Egonu, who is black, had features that “do not represent Italian-ness.”
He was suspended from his army job, with Defense Minister Guido Crosetto — a member of Meloni’s party — saying that his “personal ramblings ... discredit the army, the Defense Ministry and the constitution.”
But in the end, he was allowed to retire, and the controversy made him a celebrity on the far right.
Salvini, whose anti-immigration League has been losing ground to Meloni’s in recent years, invited him into his party and Vannacci was elected to the European Parliament in 2024.
But last month the ex-general struck out on his own, taking with him two League MPs and another who was independent but formerly in Meloni’s party.
He is targeting voters disenchanted with Salvini and also Meloni, who has radical far-right roots but in office has taken a more pragmatic approach.
National Future is “a party of the true right, pure, sincere, proud, unashamed of being right-wing,” and “not hesitant, not fearful,” Vannacci told the foreign press association Thursday.
Once a firebrand euroskeptic, Meloni has worked closely with the EU in office, while her flagship promise to cut illegal immigration has been tempered by a major boost in visas for legal migrants.
Vannacci has “a more extremist approach to issues like immigration, like security, where he explicitly talks about remigration,” Castellani said.
The ex-general highlights Italy’s Roman-Christian roots and has called for migrants to be returned to their countries of origin if they arrived illegally or committed a crime.
While Meloni has distanced herself from Italy’s Fascist past, Vannacci was accused of revisionism last year after a social media post defending the democratic credentials of dictator Benito Mussolini.
National sovereignty, meanwhile, is a priority, with Vannacci lambasting the EU as both overreaching member states’ rights and globally ineffective — not least in the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
