Attorney Bob Bauer is representing Biden in the classified documents investigation
Longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer is serving as the personal attorney for President Biden in the classified documents matter now before a Justice Department special counsel, the White House confirmed Friday.
Bauer has been the primary point of contact between the Biden camp and the Justice Department during the initial investigation, which began in November, CBS News has learned.
He served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama and as a top attorney in the 2020 Biden campaign. His wife, Anita Dunn, is a senior adviser to Mr. Biden and widely considered inside and outside the West Wing as poised to become the first woman to be White House chief of staff.
Bauer is also listed as Obama's representative to the National Archives, the designee for document requests and matters that may arise with the former president's papers.
Multiple calls, emails and text messages to Bauer were not returned this week.
Recent filings with the National Archives name three partners at D.C. law firm Covington and Burling as Biden's representatives to the Archives for his vice presidential records: Dana Remus, former Biden White House counsel, Biden campaign attorney Robert Lenhard and James Garland, a former Obama-era Justice Department official.
Their roles in the documents matter is unclear. Multiple calls and emails to Remus, Lenhard and Garland since Monday have gone unanswered.
Remus is intimately familiar with recent legal events involving the president. As the top White House lawyer, she shepherded the Supreme Court nomination of Katanji Brown Jackson and the selection of dozens of Mr. Biden's other federal judicial nominees. She previously served as top lawyer on the Biden-Harris presidential campaign.
Lenhard also handled legal issues for the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign and served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission in 2007. He specializes in government ethics cases as well as matters regarding lobbying and campaign finance.
Garland was chief of staff to former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. during the first two years of the Obama administration, making him an expert in how the sprawling department conducts investigations. He specializes in white-collar government investigations.
Remus, Lenhard and Garland also did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.
The special counsel to the president, Richard Sauber, confirmed earlier this week that personal attorneys for Mr. Biden had found the roughly 10 documents marked classified on Nov. 2 as they were cleaning out an office once used by Mr. Biden. Another "small" batch of documents was found by his lawyers at his Wilmington, Del., home on Dec. 20. The materials stemmed from Biden's tenure as vice president.
On Monday, CBS News was first to report about the presence of the documents at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The White House did not publicly acknowledge the Dec. 20 discovery until Thursday, the same day Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate how those papers were handled after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency.
In both matters, the White House says, lawyers for Biden contacted either the National Archives or Justice Department to report their findings.