BY TABITHA REEVES
Associate News Editor
Rumors of classified documents mishandled by President Biden briefly circulated the nation’s capital before a full-scale investigation was launched. After searching two of the president’s Delaware homes, as well as the Penn Biden Center office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived at the university on Feb. 15 to review over 1,850 boxes of files and 415 gigabytes of electronic records.
The suspicion that the classified papers might be in Morris Library came from Biden’s 2012 donation of his Senatorial papers to the university, his alma mater. While the donations were intended to become available to the student body as a resource in 2019, that never happened due to Biden’s run for presidential office.
Now, the documents will not become publicly available until two years after the president retires from public life.
The university declined to give a comment to The Review about the F.B.I.’s visit, stating that the Department of Justice should be contacted instead. Upon inquiring, the Department of Justice did not release a comment to The Review, and has yet to disclose findings to even major media outlets.
Similarly, both the student employees and the full-time staff of Morris Library were told not to share any information they might know regarding the archival search.
According to CNN, who first reported on the matter, the F.B.I. left the university with materials from two separate locations, but results of the investigation have yet to be publicly disclosed.
Many students said that they were unaware of the F.B.I.’s visit, only having heard of it from a friend, if at all. Seven out of 10 university students who The Review asked about the visit reported not having known about it until they were told by a friend. The remaining three students knew of the investigation at the university from reading it online or, in one case, employment at Morris Library.
Biden is not the first U.S. president to face a recent investigation of this nature. Last year, over 300 classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago, Former President Trump’s vacation home.
In an interview with ABC News, when asked about the fact that he had referred to Trump’s document scandal as “irresponsible,” Biden assured the American public that his situation was different.
“The difference is every single solitary thing I’ve been asked to do, I’ve done voluntarily,” Biden said. “I’ve invited the Justice Department to come into every aspect of any place that I had any control of.”
Even after a closed-door briefing amongst top congressional lawmakers about the findings of the Department of Justice’s search, no new information has been released, aside from commentary on the vagueness of the briefing.
As a result of the secrecy clouding the search of the university, students are left with little confirmed information.
“I don’t know of anything that is marked like it was top secret, highly classified, et cetera,” Biden said. “But I am told not to comment on that, because I don’t even know what they were able — what they confiscated.”
