DOJ Was Reportedly Ready to Use Search Warrant to Get Classified Files From Biden's Delaware Home

If US President Joe Biden didn’t agree to cooperate voluntarily with a search of his Delaware home for classified files, the US Department of Justice was prepared to obtain a search warrant in order to do so, according to reports in US media on Thursday.

The six files found on January 21 in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, family home were not the first found in Biden’s custody in recent months. Days earlier, Biden aides found classified documents in filing cabinets in the Biden family home’s garage, and several batches of files have been found in Biden’s personal files in offices he used while a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The earlier searches had been entrusted to Biden’s lawyers, but when it came to the 13-hour search of the Biden home, the DOJ turned to the FBI, its top federal law enforcement agency.

While some of the documents date to the time Biden was vice president, from 2009 until 2017, others came from the span of time Biden was a US senator, from 1973 until 2009. In all, it seems several dozen documents were found, although the White House has been evasive and dismissive of the details of the situation.

Last August, the FBI was also used to carry out a search-and-seizure warrant for classified files at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate of former US President Donald Trump. The raid recovered hundreds of classified files, also improperly stored, which the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had been trying to recover for months.

Trump has called the differences between the DOJ’s treatment of Biden and himself unfair, and accused the FBI of being used as a political weapon to stop him from returning to office in 2024.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has pushed back on those accusations, saying earlier this week that the DOJ has “a set of norms and practices,” including “that we do not have different rules for Democrats or Republicans, different rules for the powerful or powerless, different rules for the rich or poor.”

“We apply the facts and the law in each case in a neutral and nonpartisan manner,” he added. “That is what we always do, and that is what we do in the matters you are referring to.”

Notably, the fact that Biden has so far cooperated with the DOJ’s investigation, whereas Trump has not, might also explain their different experiences. The DOJ has not announced charges against either man.