Biden faces scrutiny over classified files

US President Joe Biden is drawing criticism from Republicans after 10 classified documents were found last November in his former office at a think tank in Washington, prompting an investigation by the Department of Justice.

Biden said on Tuesday that he was "surprised" that government records were taken to one of his former private offices, at the Penn Biden Center. "I was surprised to learn there were any government records that were taken there to that office," Biden told reporters in Mexico City, where he was meeting the leaders of Mexico and Canada.

Biden said he doesn't know "what's in the documents" that were found in a locked closet when his attorneys were vacating office space at the Penn Biden Center.

The center is a think tank near the White House, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and named for Biden, a veteran Democrat who served as US vice-president from January 2009 to January 2017.

The classified documents found inside the closet were reportedly US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and Britain.

The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it was reviewing the sensitive documents found by Biden's lawyers last year after the White House said it did not know what was in them. The discovery only came to light on Monday in a report by CBS News.

The White House Counsel's Office on Tuesday did not answer questions on why it took two months to make the disclosure.

Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House Counsel's Office, said in a statement: "This is an ongoing process under review (by the Department of Justice), so we are going to be limited in what we can say at this time."

Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, said in a statement that "a small number of documents with classified markings" were found by Biden's lawyers in a "locked closet" on Nov 2, while they were clearing out his office at the Penn Biden Center.

Sauber said that following the discovery of the documents, Biden's attorneys immediately alerted the White House Counsel's Office. The archives administration picked up the documents the next day.

The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, which has headquarters at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was founded following Biden's two terms as vice-president in the administration of president Barack Obama.

Trump response

The center officially opened in February 2018, but had a "soft" opening in March 2017, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper at the university.

Biden would occasionally use an office at the center in Washington from 2017 until 2019, when he launched his presidential campaign.

News of the discovery of the documents prompted a response by former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies, after Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida was raided by the FBI last year in a search for classified documents taken during his four years in office.

Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: "When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified."

Dozens of documents marked classified were found at Trump's Florida estate in August. The FBI carried out the raid after attempts to recover them were rebuffed.

In May 2021, the National Archives contacted Trump's team about the documents that were in his possession, saying they needed to be returned because they are government property.

By January 2022, Trump's team gave some of the documents to the National Archives but the archives discovered that the returned material included classified and other material. It asked the Justice Department to launch a probe into the alleged mishandling of classified files.

In August, the FBI retrieved dozens more documents in rooms at Mar-a-Lago. Altogether, Trump had 300 documents in 33 boxes, the FBI said.

In a September interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, Biden called Trump's possession of the documents "irresponsible".

Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the new GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, asked reporters: "Is the White House going to be raided tonight?"

Agencies and Xinhua contributed to this story.