WASHINGTON — President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn in November that his lawyers found classified government documents in his former office at a think tank in Washington, and he said he does not know what information they contain.
Mr. Biden spoke a day after the White House acknowledged that his lawyers had discovered a small cache of Obama-era documents as they packed up his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The Justice Department is reviewing the discovery to determine how to proceed.
The revelation has created a political headache for Mr. Biden, who has called former President Donald J. Trump irresponsible for hoarding sensitive documents at his private club and residence in Florida, and a tactical opportunity for Republicans who had been badly divided in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections.
The White House has stressed that the circumstances are different — that Mr. Biden had neither been notified that he had official records nor been asked to return them, and his team promptly revealed the discovery to the archives and returned them within a day.
Mr. Biden on Tuesday said he takes “classified documents seriously” and that his team had immediately contacted the National Archives to turn over the materials. “We’re cooperating fully — cooperating fully — with the review,” he said.
He also distanced himself from the matter, suggesting that someone else had brought the files there without his knowledge.
“After I was briefed about the discovery, I was surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken to that office,” he said at news conference in Mexico, where he appeared with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, and Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.
“But I don’t know what’s in the documents,” Mr. Biden said.
The Justice Department review is aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating Mr. Trump’s failure to return all of the sensitive documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Garland has been briefed on the inquiry, according to a person familiar with the situation, though it is not clear if he has made a decision.
The documents included briefing materials on foreign countries from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president, two people familiar with the situation said Tuesday. They asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
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The papers were found on Nov. 2, and the National Archives retrieved them the next morning. The White House waited to publicly acknowledge the matter on Monday, in response to a CBS News report revealing what had happened.
The discovery came a week before the midterm congressional elections, when the news would have been a high-profile, last-minute development.
Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, said that the Biden team was being circumspect about its public discussion of the matter because the Justice Department is examining it.
“This is an ongoing process under review by D.O.J., so we are going to be limited in what we can say at this time,” he said. “But we are committed to doing this the right way, and we will provide further details when and as appropriate.”
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As the president met with officials from Mexico and Canada to discuss trade and immigration, the newly installed House Republican majority in Washington seized on the story to kick off what is expected to be two years of investigations of the Biden administration, with a far-reaching request by the Oversight Committee to the National Archives for correspondence among the archives, the Justice Department and top Biden aides.
The committee’s new chairman, Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, said the government had moved aggressively against Mr. Trump for his possession of classified documents, but not Mr. Biden, who he said had “repeatedly kept classified materials in an insecure location for years” but “never faced a raid.”
“Meanwhile, the F.B.I. conducted a raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence for the same violation,” Mr. Comer said.
The circumstances of the two cases are starkly different, however. Unlike Mr. Trump, who resisted months of government requests to return the material stored at Mar-a-Lago and failed to fully comply with a subpoena, Mr. Biden’s team appears to have acted swiftly and in accordance with the law, immediately summoning officials with the National Archives to retrieve the files. The archives then alerted the Justice Department, according to the White House.
The episode illustrated Mr. Biden’s difficulty extracting himself from political peril, even when buoyed by events like the Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans, eager to move on from the rancor of their recent House leadership fight, hope to spin the Biden documents case into an attack that sustains a protracted congressional investigation that damages Mr. Biden and blunts the impact of Mr. Trump’s troubles on the party.
Mr. Garland, whose time in office has been defined by his department’s investigations of Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the documents case, assigned the preliminary phase of the inquiry to John R. Lausch Jr., the U.S. attorney in Chicago. The pick was intended to blunt criticism that Mr. Garland was seeking to protect the Democratic president who appointed him.
But the inevitable comparison of the Trump documents case with the Biden matter has put new pressure on Mr. Garland, who decided in November to assign both Trump investigations to a special counsel, Jack Smith, to avoid accusations of a political vendetta against the former president.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Garland appeared together at a state visit to Mexico when news of the documents broke on Monday, but neither had any comment at the time, and a department spokesman also refused to comment.
The White House said Mr. Biden’s lawyers found the documents in a locked closet, intermingled with personal papers as they were packing up boxes from the office.
Mr. Biden and his aides had used the office from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 presidential campaign, and the lawyers were preparing to vacate the space, the White House has said. The discovery was not in response to any prior request from the archives, and there was no indication that Mr. Biden or his team resisted efforts to recover any sensitive documents.
When Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered the documents, they immediately cleared the room and stopped looking at the files, according to a person briefed on their account of the incident. As a result, the Biden team does not know how many classified documents had been in the closet and what all of their contents were, according to the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
The National Archives was required to notify the Justice Department that classified material had been discovered in an unauthorized place, as it did in January 2022 when it found 184 files marked as classified in 15 boxes of materials it retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
In that matter, the Justice Department eventually developed evidence that Mr. Trump was still holding on to numerous other classified materials. It obtained a grand jury subpoena in May, leading his team to provide 38 additional such documents, at which time they falsely said that was all there were.
After obtaining further evidence that Mr. Trump was still withholding documents, the F.B.I. obtained a judicial warrant to search Mar-a-Lago and found 103 more, along with thousands of other publicly owned but unclassified documents and photographs. A federal judge is weighing whether to hold Mr. Trump’s team in contempt for defying the May subpoena.
Mr. Garland assigned Mr. Lausch, a Trump appointee, to conduct a so-called initial investigation aimed at gathering facts and legal research in the case of Mr. Biden to inform whether it would be appropriate to appoint a special counsel.
Mr. Biden said that his aides had cooperated fully with the National Archives after informing them of what had been found.
He said his lawyers had advised him not to even ask what was in the files, and said he hoped the inquiry “will be finished soon.”
Stephanie Lai, Luke Broadwater and Adam Goldman contributed reporting
