offices. that according to a source familiar with the story. the documents were discovered last fall and turned over to the national archives which referred the matter to the u.s. justice department for further investigation. welcome to our viewers here in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. and we begin our coverage tonight with the breaking news that we re following. classified government documents found inside one of president biden s private offices. the records dating from biden s time as vice president during obama administration. cnn s senior justice correspondent has been working the story for us. he s got the new information. update our viewers on exactly what is going on. this is reporting from our colleague and our team. we re told the president s legal team discovered the classified documents that were discovered in a office that the president had when he was setting up an office with the university of penn
would impact their willingness to cooperate with the investigation. that means that someone or more than one person is cooperating with the doj. and number three, disclosure of the government affidavit would chill future cooperation in other high-profile investigations. what are those other investigations? the doj also adds, quote, the government does not object to unsealing other materials filed in connection with the search warrant whose unsealing would not jeopardize the integrity of this national security investigation. mark warner and marco rubio sent a private letter yesterday to the director of national intelligence and attorney general merrick garland to request more information on the records seized. and the ranking member of the house foreign affairs committee, mike mccall, made this argument on cnn earlier. the affidavit of probable cause in support of the warrant, we need to see that in congress on the intelligence committee. if it s such a national security thr
i m told there were fewer than a dozen documents, but they were classified. they were of a certain level. were they top secret? they were under category called sci. that s higher than top secret. and that but that we don t know the significance. we don t know the content. they don t know what they pertain to. but absolutely. sensitive compartment information, which is one of the highest classified levels of classification. that biden s lawyers, as soon as they saw the documents, they immediately called the national archives and said we found these. we want to get them to you. and part of the process here, wolf, and jamie knows this well from our coverage of the trump mar-a-lago documents and that drama is a damage assessment that is done by the fbi to determine whether any sensitive
you know, allegedly revealed very sensitive intelligence in the oval office to the russians. i remember getting that phone call and my jaw dropping. i was just outside the oval office once when a group of reporters were in there and the president took fistfuls of classified information and waved them in front of the reporters and bragged about what he had access to. there was also a photographer in the room. afterwards we made sure pictures hadn t been taken. this was a big concern. what i will say that people aren t pointing to is how serious the information leveling is. secret information is defined under law as information that if released could cause grave damage to national security. top secret, if released, could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. what we re talking about according to reports is information that s even above. that s what s called sci, sensitive compartmented information. these are the things we would worry about if donald trump looked at them,