The burning question about Joe Biden’s classified documents left unanswered

Meeting with the Beltway press corps shortly after news President Joe Biden had been holding a second tranche of classified documents in a garage at his Wilmington, Delaware, home, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered few answers to reporters’ specific questions.

Asked about the release of a visitors’ log to his home by a Fox News reporter, Jean-Pierre shut him down, asking instead why there was no protest from his network about former President Donald Trump‘s decision to do away with the White House visitor log. Jean-Pierre also had no answers laying out why investigators were searching Biden’s Wilmington home, why the documents were in his garage in the first place, nor how they got there, referring reporters’ questions to the Department of Justice.

The biggest question mark, however, is what the documents contain, and whether they could have potentially posed a threat to national security if they’d fallen into the wrong hands—something the White House has yet to offer an answer for.

Where the contents of classified documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home remain unknown amid an ongoing Department of Justice probe into how they ended up there, federal investigators released photographic evidence from the site showing dates as well as classified markings on a number of files found there, allowing the public to infer the security clearance required to view them and what may have been happening in the world at the time.

That has not occurred for Biden, with the quantity—and nature—of the newly discovered classified material still unclear.

One CNN report quoted anonymous sources claiming some documents found in a previous cache of documents at his honorary office at the University of Pennsylvania were foreign policy briefing memos on topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.

As for the documents in his Wilmington garage, Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday that Biden “did not know that the records were there” when pressed about the documents in his garage, nor did he know what was in them.

Biden has also said that his lawyers have advised him not to ask what was in the classified documents amid a pending DOJ probe into how they ended up there, a statement Jean-Pierre said was an effort to “do things by the book.”

“His team has been complying, cooperating with the Department of Justice and I will leave it there,” she said. “I’m not going to go beyond that.”

Newsweek has reached out to the White House press office for additional comment.