JUST IN: CNN Source Ticks Through Contents Of Biden Classified Docs Batch — And How They Were Found

CNN’s Jamie Gangel and Marshall Cohen developed a source who told them exactly what documents were among the batch that was flagged and returned to the federal government — and exactly how they were found.

Questions have swirled since news broke Monday that President Biden’s lawyers discovered a small number of documents — from his time as VP — bearing classified marking while clearing out a private office last fall and immediately reported and returned the documents to the federal government.

While the news has drawn direct comparisons — particularly among conservatives —  with the investigation that exploded onto the national radar with the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home, analysts, reporters, and others have taken pains to delineate what they say are clear differences between the two matters.

An exclusive new report from Gangel and Cohen solves some of the mystery around the story:

Among the items from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are 10 classified documents including US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The documents were dated between 2013 and 2016, according to the source.

On Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, Gangel joined anchor John King and his panel to report the news:

JOHN KING: Jamie, let’s walk as clearly as we can about what we do know and what we don’t know in terms of what was discovered. Your reporting is the search of a private office. Lawyers involved because the former vice president, now president, knew there were sensitive family materials in there. He wanted somebody sensitive looking at them. They come across an envelope, open it up and…

JAMIE GANGEL: So, by and large, I think we have to underscore 98, 99% of what is found in this office is absolutely personal Biden material, including things like the arrangements for his son, Beau’s funeral, condolence letters. But what happens is, as they’re going through the boxes, the lawyer who is doing it for, because these were confidential family materials, opens a box and there is a plain manila envelope that says it’s stamped “VP personal.” So maybe that’s how this all happened when it got packed up. Someone thought it was personal. The lawyer opens the envelope and there is something that says “classified” right there. He closes the envelope. Houston, we have a problem. He makes the appropriate calls. He says to the National Archives, “Come and get it.” What we know is that when they go through, there were about three or four boxes that did not appear, once they started going through them, to have just personal things and what they: find a number of records that are unclassified but fall under the Presidential Records Act, and then they find ten documents that are classified. And what my source says is they include intelligence memos, national security memos, background briefing memos that cover areas from Iran, Ukraine and the U.K.

Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.