FBI searched Biden home, found more items marked classified

Zeke Miller, Michael Alsamo and Colleen Long Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI searched President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday and located additional documents with classified markings and also took possession of some of his handwritten notes, the president’s lawyer said Saturday.

The president voluntarily allowed the FBI into his home, but the lack of a search warrant did not dim the extraordinary nature of the search. It compounded the embarrassment to Biden that started with the disclosure Jan. 12 that the president’s attorneys had found a “small number” of classified records at a former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington shortly before the midterm elections. Since then, attorneys found six classified documents in Biden’s Wilmington home library from his time as vice president.

Though Biden has maintained “ there’s no there there,” the discoveries have become a political liability as he prepares to launch a reelection bid, and they undercut his efforts to portray an image of propriety to the American public after demonizing his predecessor, Donald Trump, who, as president had the power to declassify documents.

During Friday’s search, which lasted nearly 13 hours, the FBI took six items that contained documents with classified markings, said Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer. The items spanned Biden’s time in the Senate and the vice presidency, while the notes dated to his time as vice president, he said. The level of classification, and whether the documents removed by the FBI remained classified, was not immediately clear as the Justice Department reviews the records.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Fitzpatrick confirmed Saturday that the FBI had executed “a planned, consensual search” of the president’s residence in Wilmington.

The president and first lady Jill Biden were not at the home when it was searched. They were spending the weekend at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Speaking to reporters during a trip to California on Thursday, Biden said he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.

“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said. “We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”

It remained to be seen whether additional searches by federal officials of other locations might be conducted. Biden’s personal attorneys previously conducted a search of the Rehoboth Beach residence and said they did not find any official documents or classified records.

The Biden investigation has also complicated the Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s retention of classified documents and official records after he left office. The Justice Department says Trump took hundreds of records marked classified with him upon leaving the White House in early 2021 and resisted months of requests to return them to the government, and that it had to obtain a search warrant to retrieve them.

Kash Patel, former chief of staff to the Acting United States Secretary of Defense under President Donald Trump, has been granted immunity in the Mir-a-Lago case and is considered crucial to answering the question of whether or not Trump declassified any of the documents he took with him to his Florida estate. Patel says he heard Trump verbally order the government documents declassified. Patel, in a recent opinion piece for Creator’s Syndicate, writes, “By going along with the overheated Trump document scandal, Biden got himself a political issue that no doubt helped in the midterm elections. He’s now paying the price. Biden should certainly not have had classified materials in his garage or at his think tank. Waiting to disclose that fact until after the midterm elections and even after the important followon Georgia Senate election was possibly the biggest abuse of all. Like Trump, though, Biden’s actual possession of the documents is more of an administrative slap on the wrist violation and less of a national scandal. Hillary Clinton’s violation, involving classified materials placed on unclassified computers tied to the public internet, was much more egregious than anything Trump or Biden have been accused of, and even then, there was no criminal sanction. Yet Biden played along with the unfair treatment of Trump. After pretending the Trump scandal was more than it was, Biden and his allies are now hamstrung coming out and explaining this reality. ‘What goes around comes around’ will be fun for Biden’s opponents, but none of this is good for America, and it’s certainly not good for the office of the president.”

Bauer said the FBI requested that the White House not comment on the search before it was conducted, and that Biden’s personal and White House attorneys were present. The FBI, he added, “had full access to the President’s home, including personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades.”

The Justice Department, he added, “took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate any potential wrongdoing surrounding the Biden documents. Hur is set to take over from the Trump-appointed Illinois U.S. Attorney John Lausch in overseeing the probe.

Biden has made a point of cooperating with the DOJ probe at every turn, and Friday’s search was voluntary, though questions about his transparency with the public remain.

For a crime to have been committed, a person would have to “knowingly remove” the documents without authority and intend to keep them at an “unauthorized location.” Biden has said he was “surprised” that classified documents were uncovered at the Penn Biden Center.

Generally, classified documents are to be declassified after a maximum of 25 years. But some records are of such value they remain classified for far longer, though specific exceptions must be granted. Biden served in the Senate from 1973 to 2009. Seung Min Kim in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, contributed to this report.

Here’s how long it will take to replenish U.S. weapons stocks sent to Ukraine

Micaela Burrow, Reporter

The Daily Caller

The U.S. will not be able to restock inventories of critical munitions sent to Ukraine for years, even as some stockpiles have become nearly depleted, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found.

The U.S. has provided 1.1 million rounds of 155mm ammunition to Ukraine as of Thursday, Jan. 19, according to the Pentagon.

“Fortunately, in this year’s NDAA, the Armed Services Committees included critical audit provisions for this funding, including one that will provide quarterly reports on the production of the US munitions industrial base,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Even at emergency production rates, it will take several years before the U.S. is able to restock supplies of critical munitions sent to Ukraine, according to a recent analysis conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C. based think tank.

The U.S. has sent millions of rounds of ammunition of various kinds to Ukraine, according to a Thursday fact sheet from the Department of Defense (DOD), which has resulted in severe deficits in some cases. Only one of the six weapons where stockpiles have fallen dangerously low is projected to reach normal levels within five years, assuming no further deliveries to Ukraine, leaving the U.S. scrambling for alternatives, Mark Cancian, a former artillery officer and Pentagon acquisition official, found in a report published in CSIS.

“Longer term, there will be some competition between Taiwan’s needs and rebuilding US stockpiles,” Cancian told the Daily Caller News Foundation, as the U.S. pledges to help the island fend off Chinese aggression. “That’s why increased munitions production is so important.”

“Most inventories, though not all, will take many years to replace. For most items, there are workarounds, but there may be a crisis brewing over artillery ammunition,” Cancian wrote.

For example, the U.S. has provided 1.1 million rounds of 155mm ammunition, a widelyused explosive shell, to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the fact sheet shows.

At the regular production rate of 93,000 rounds annually, the industrial base would never be able to replenish 155mm projectiles because of the number consumed in standard military training and maintenance operations, the CSIS report said. The base can surge to a rate of 240,000 rounds each year, but even then it would take five years before inventories of 155mm would be fully rebuilt.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged in May that DOD will not allow domestic inventories of “critical” munitions to fall below minimum levels needed for national security, according to Defense News. Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh repeated that promise on Thursday.

Army acquisition czar Doug Bush said in September the service planned to triple 155mm production over the next “couple” of years with support from Congress, Task and Purpose reported. The Army held an “Industry Day” on Tuesday to provide arms manufacturing companies with an overview of the army’s requirements for accelerating production of 155mm projectiles and the need to expand production capacity, a notice shows.

The U.S. has pulled hundreds of thousands of the 155mm shells from stockpiles operated by U.S. military units in Israel and routed them to Ukraine. Additional equipment of an unspecified nature may be transferred out of U.S. forces in Korea, Reuters reported Thursday.

“The Ukrainians will never run out of ammunition,” Cancian told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Supply for lighter weapons, like rifles and machine guns, could continue indefinitely, but “artillery ammunition,” the foundation of ground warfare, “has been the most difficult,” he added.

To make up for shortages, the U.S. has begun substituting some weapons that may be slightly less appropriate to the type of warfare

Ukraine is conducting and buying artillery from other countries, Cancian explained to the DCNF. GPS-guided 155 mm munitions are also at risk, according to the analysis. Recent production rates of 1,000 per year mean it could take seven years to refill U.S. inventories, or four years at an accelerated production rate.

At the recent rate of production, it will take eight years to replenish U.S. stocks of Javelins; surge production rates could shorten the timeline to five and one-half years, according to the CSIS analysis. Javelin stocks have become so strained that DOD suspended further deliveries to Ukraine to avoid undercutting plans for dealing with possible conflicts elsewhere.

Stinger missiles could take even longer, up to 18 years, corresponding with decreasing demand within DOD for the munition.

Cancian predicted the inventory of High Mobility Artillery Rockets System (HIMARS) could be restocked within three years. However, part of the reason for the more comfortable production margin is that the U.S. has donated so few — just 20 as of Jan. 6 — relative to Ukraine’s needs, Cancian wrote.

Thursday’s defense package did not include any additional HIMARS, Stingers or Javelins, according to a release.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is firing artillery at a rate of roughly 90,000 rounds per month, officials told The New York Times in November. Russia’s industrial base, while dwarfed by that of the collective West, has already shifted to wartime footing, The Wall Street Journal reported. NATO SecretaryGeneral Jens Stoltenberg warned that “we should not underestimate Russia” as Moscow works to build up its own munitions stores and appears to be planning a mass mobilization.

Congress granted DOD the authority to streamline the purchasing process by allowing the Pentagon to make contracts that extend for multiple years and eliminating some restrictions in the defense bill for 2023, the National Defense Authorization

Act (NDAA).

“Fortunately, in this year’s NDAA, the Armed Services Committees included critical audit provisions for this funding, including one that will provide quarterly reports on the production of the US munitions industrial base,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher told the DCNF.

A trilateral inspector general (IG) body, composed of the IGs from DOD, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, released a full strategy to monitor the United States’ Ukraine response, including how it balances between supporting Ukraine and maintaining supplies for its own needs, on Wednesday.

What the IGs cannot evaluate, however, is the way Ukraine determines worthwhile targets

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Able to read maps to locate and open graves. Organizational and positions weapons to launch, Cancian told the DCNF. The more ammunition Ukrainian forces have access to at any one time, the more fires they can launch at targets that become “progressively lower priority.”

DOD did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org

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