The Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a 12-hour sweeping search of Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware on Friday, according to multiple reports breaking on Saturday night.
Jennifer Jacobs, a Bloomberg News reporter, verified that it was indeed the FBI that carried out the exhaustive search of Biden’s home.
“Justice Department officials did ‘a thorough’ 12-hour search of Biden’s Wilmington home on Friday; it began at 9:45 a.m. and finished around 10:30 p.m.,” Jacobs reported. “DOJ found six more ‘items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials’.”
“It was the FBI that did the search of Biden’s home Friday in Wilmington, sources tell Chris Strom and me,” Jacobs added.
“There was NO WARRANT and NO SUBPOENA for FBI search at Biden’s Wilmington home on Friday, I’m told. It was a voluntary search agreed to by Biden and his personal legal team,” she added.
CNN also reported on Saturday night that the FBI carried out the exhaustive search, providing more details to the story.
“FBI investigators on Friday found additional classified material after conducting a search of President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home,” CNN reported.
The President’s lawyer Bob Bauer said in an earlier statement that the DOJ had conducted it.
“Yesterday, D.O.J. completed a thorough search of all the materials in the president’s Wilmington home,” the President’s lawyer Bob Bauer said in a statement. “It began at approximately 9:45 a.m. and concluded at around 10:30 p.m. and covered all working, living and storage spaces in the home.”
“D.O.J. had full access to the president’s home, including personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades,” he added.
In late August, the FBI’s search warrant and affidavit were released to the public. The search warrant listed three crimes involving alleged violations of the Espionage Act and the National Archives and Records Act (NARA).
The FBI’s search warrant for the Mar-a-Lago raid showed the investigative scope to be both classified and unclassified documents, evidence of transmission of “national defense information or classified material,” and evidence relating to the alternation/destruction of “Presidential Records, or of any documents with classification markings.”
Along with a reported 184 documents with classified markings, the FBI seized three passports, privileged documents and a file on a presidential pardon at Mar-a-Lago.
However, the FBI’s extensive search of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home was conducted after the president’s attorneys had previously turned over stashes of classified documents while reportedly “unsupervised.”
“The Justice Department considered having FBI agents monitor a search by President Biden’s lawyers for classified documents at his homes but decided against it, both to avoid complicating later stages of the investigation and because Mr. Biden’s attorneys had quickly turned over a first batch and were cooperating, according to people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
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