The FBI searched President Joe Biden’s home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Wednesday to look for classified documents.
The president’s attorney said the FBI didn’t find anything. Agents took notes and other materials relating to Biden’s time as vice president for review and safe keeping.
The search, disclosed by Biden’s personal lawyer, was the latest discomfiting moment for a president who had previously sought to contrast his sensitivity to rule-following with that of former President Donald Trump.
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Wednesday’s search, the third for a Biden home or office, was an extraordinary development for a sitting president, and made clear that an investigation that had simmered quietly for weeks was continuing rather than fading away as Biden, who has said he was surprised by an earlier records discovery, presumably hoped.
The attorney, Bob Bauer, said FBI agents spent three and a half hours searching the home.
Biden’s attorneys revealed last month that they had undertaken their search of the home without turning up classified materials. The fact the FBI did its own search reflected the Justice Department’s determination to retrieve any and all possible classified items rather than rely on assurances that such documents had been located.
The latest search follows the FBI’s 13-hour, top-to-bottom check of his Wilmington, Delaware, home, where agents located documents with classified markings from his time as a vice president and senator and also took possession of some of his handwritten notes.
One week earlier, Biden’s personal lawyers revealed that they had found a document bearing classified markings while searching the Wilmington property but said they had not found others during a separate inspection of the Rehoboth Beach home.
The White House did not disclose the Justice Department’s investigation until last month, when it acknowledged the Nov. 2 discovery of classified documents by Biden lawyers as they closed an office at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank affiliated with the Ivy League school.
A spokesman for the White House Counsel’s office, Ian Sams, on Wednesday again defended the administration’s public response, which has been delayed and uneven.
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“I think we’ve been pretty transparent from the very beginning,” he said. “We want to be careful to be very respectful of the integrity of that ongoing investigation.”
The Biden documents probe is being handled by a special counsel, Robert Hur, a former senior Justice Department official during the Trump administration who served as the top federal prosecutor in Baltimore. He is starting his work this week, inheriting a months-long investigation already undertaken by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors.
The Bidens purchased their Rehoboth Beach home, which overlooks a state park adjacent to the beach, in June 2017, months after he left the vice presidency.
The Associated Press contributed to this article