NBC News reports that the FBI took President Joe Biden’s personal notebooks during its recent 13-hour search of his Wilmington, Delaware, residence. 

This is the latest development in the ongoing classified document scandal, in which it has been discovered that Biden has improperly been in possession of classified materials from both his time as U.S. president and his time as a U.S. Senator.

Initially, classified documents – including some marked “top-secret” – were found at the Penn Biden Center in Washington D.C. This discovery was made by Biden’s lawyers just before the 2022 midterm election – a fact that, in itself, has raised a lot of eyebrows.

Since this initial discovery, however, several other batches of classified documents were found at Biden’s Wilmington residence. One batch was discovered in the garage before another batch was discovered in the residence.

The 13-hour search

After these discoveries, reports indicate that the White House asked the FBI to conduct a search of Biden’s residence.

This distinguishes the FBI’s search of Biden’s residence with the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate back in August. Many, including the former president, have sought to highlight the disparity of treatment by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in these two cases, and this is just one more example.

Reports indicate that the DOJ – which does claim to be investigating the Biden classified documents scandal – and Biden’s people came to an agreement regarding the search, an agreement in which – unlike the Trump raid – Biden’s attornies were allowed to be on hand.

During the search, it was initially reported that the FBI found classified documents from Biden’s time as a U.S. Senator.

But, now it appears that the FBI found and took from the residence more than just these documents.

The latest

According to NBC’s report, “a person familiar with the investigation” has informed the outlet that the FBI took notebooks belonging to Biden from the residence.

NBC explains that “the notebooks were seized because Biden’s notes on some of the pages relate to his official business as vice president, including details of his diplomatic engagements during the Obama administration, and may refer to classified information . . .”

NBC then quotes its source as clarifying that the notebooks were not officially classified but “could be considered as such given their sensitive content.”

The source goes on to report the contents of the seized notebooks. NBC reports:

On some pages Biden wrote down things about his family or his life unrelated to public office, said this same person. On other pages, he memorialized in writing some of his experiences or thoughts as vice president at the time, according to this same source.

Neither Biden, the White House, nor the DOJ has commented on the seizure of the notebooks.