In “mid-November,” the FBI conducted a search of President Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., where the president’s private lawyers had discovered classified documents — some at the highly sensitive TS/SCI level (i.e., top-secret, sensitive compartmented information) — on November 2.
CBS News reports that the president consented to the search. The report is not clear on exactly when the consensual search took place, and CBS relates that its two unidentified sources were not clear on whether the bureau seized any additional classified documents.
The network adds that no search warrant was sought by the Justice Department, in light of the cooperation of the president and his team. This, then, appears to mirror the circumstances surrounding the bureau’s consensual search of Biden’s private residence in Wilmington, Del., on January 20 — eight days after his counsel discovered classified documents in his den there, and a month after they found classified documents in his garage there.
The January 20 residence search was also consensual. As I then explained, when the government has probable cause of possible crimes, such that it could obtain a search warrant from a judge, it is not uncommon for the subject of an investigation to consent to a search, in order to demonstrate cooperation.
There is obviously a lot we don’t know about this newly disclosed consensual search. Since we are being told, vaguely, that it happened in mid-November, I am hypothesizing that was directed by Chicago U.S. attorney John Lausch. On November 14, Lausch was assigned by Attorney General Merrick Garland to conduct a preliminary investigation to assess whether a special counsel from outside the Biden Justice Department ought to be appointed. It would have been sensible, upon getting that assignment, for Lausch to make an investigative plan with the FBI that included a search of the Penn Biden Center office.
CBS has previously reported that, although Biden’s think tank, formally known as the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, did not open until February 2018, Biden began using the sixth-floor office in the building there months earlier — sometime in mid 2017. Biden’s term in the White House as Obama administration vice president ended on January 20, 2017. Ergo, the files that eventually ended up at the Penn Biden office must have been in some other unauthorized location between the time Biden left the White House and the time he moved into that office in, say, late spring or early summer 2017.
If, as the White House maintains, President Biden and his team have been transparent and cooperative with the Justice Department, we have to presume that they’ve informed the FBI of any other locations where Biden’s Obama administration materials may have been stored, and any other locations where Biden believes he may have retained classified documents. Have there been consensual searches in such locations? We don’t know.
It has also been reported that the Justice Department opted not to have the FBI participate in searches of other Biden private locations — such as his residences in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Del. Instead, it was decided to leave this task to Biden’s private lawyers, even though they do not have security clearances. If that reporting is accurate, it seems even more puzzling. That is, if the FBI was already on the case and had conducted at least one search at a private Biden location with Biden’s consent, why not have the bureau lead the other searches as well — for the sake of both national security and evidentiary integrity? Why abide a situation where private lawyers were encouraged to search for, and foreseeably found (in Biden’s Wilmington garage and den), classified information that they were not authorized to see or possess?
As is often the case, disclosures raise at least as many questions as they answer.