knew documents had been shipped during the 2017 transition, so that s the former office and these two residences which you see there on the screen. now, the other question is if there are other searches, who exactly would do them? because right now they have the president s private attorney and a white house attorney conducting these searches. now, only the white house attorney has the proper clearance and this gets a little messy. one attorney finds something, has to stop, wait for the person who has clearance, then it has to be handed over to the justice department. look, john, i m not saying there is some playbook for sitting presidents who have to undergo a search for classified materials from the time they were vice president, but this can potentially get a little messy. now, it is interesting in our reporting we learned the u.s. attorney out in chicago who originally handled the review of this case, he didn t ask for searches, he didn t conduct any searches. the biden team did th
american people and prosecutors and judges and juries are most forgiving when they don t feel like they re being, you know, led down a path without being told the truth. this seems to me to be a pretty simple call by this president just to come forward and say this is what we re doing, this is what we ve found, this is how it happened, this is what i m going to do to make sure we ve recovered everything, and at that point he s dealt with it politically but i really think at the end of the day he s delta variant with it legally. i don t fault his lawyers for being cautious, in this environment that s probably a well-deserved place to be, but at the same time you know this has been a political mess and could turn into a legal mess. even in the opening i was chuckling at how the comment about there was frustration over the pace of the search. for crying out loud, i mean, we re talking about a few weeks versus months or a year in the search down in florida.
the death toll from the russian missile attack on the apartment building in dnipro, ukraine, a rising. ukrainian officials say the total number of people killed now stands at 44. earlier this morning ukraine s first lady olena zelenska speaking in davos condemning russia for the senseless murder of civilians. translator: there is nothing off limits for russia. this missile was built to destroy aircraft carriers and was used against the civilian infrastructure. these ordinary people at home on a saturday, that s enough reason for russia to skill. we will take you live to the site of that atrocity where search and rescue efforts are ongoing. here in the u.s. several meetings are happening today. president biden hosts the dutch prime minister at the white house, secretary of state antony blinken meets his uk counterpart in a high-level delegation from the united states is in kyiv at this very moment.
so these have gotten conflated together and i think that s hurting biden and it will hurt him to come out and just level with where we are, what he s doing, what he s going to do to fix it, how it happened and face it head-on. we have differentiated the legal consequence both of these cases but you can t deny that the optics at least politically harm this current president, president biden, who said that he came in with sophistication, right, with experience and criticized former president trump with how he handled classified documents. michael, if i can just follow up with you on the question of the volume of documents because we ve said that maybe perhaps there s under 20 versus the 300 or so that president trump had stored. does that matter as much as the level of sensitivity and classification of these documents? it probably wouldn t matter if all of the documents if 20 documents are top secret and at the highest designation then
there are new concerns for the white house this morning with sources telling cnn that even more searches of president biden s properties are now possible. it s unclear where those would take place or who would conduct them. cnn s senior legal affairs correspondent paula reid joins us now. what properties are we talking about here, paula? our sources did not give us specific locations but we know from our reporting that the president used other office spaces, his family also, for example, rented a home in northern virginia. important to note t wouldn t just be potentially searches for additional classified documents but also potentially be looking for other presidential records that would need to be turned over to the archives. in terms of what has been searched so far, after that initial discovery of classified documents at the president s former office here in d.c., his team of attorneys decided to carry out some additional searches, but they specifically focused on locations wher