Once could be a fluke. Twice might be a coincidence, but in this case it also creates a crisis for Joe Biden — and the media. Just think of what will happen if attorneys find a third set of classified documents in yet a third Biden location.

Actually, it turns out that the latest discovery involved a second and third location, albeit adjacent, at Biden’s Wilmington home — his garage and another unidentified space:

President Biden’s aides found an additional batch of a small number of classified records after searching his residences in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Del., Richard Sauber, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, said in a statement Thursday.

“All but one of these documents were found in storage space in the President’s Wilmington residence garage,” Mr. Sauber said. “One document consisting of one page was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room. No documents were found in the Rehoboth Beach residence.”

The additional batch was found after documents with classified markings were located at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the president’s Washington-based think tank, on Nov. 2. The search was done in coordination with the Justice Department and the lawyers completed the review Wednesday, Mr. Sauber said. …

The discovery of another set of classified documents is likely to intensify the political pressure on the president as the Justice Department determines how to handle the case of former President Donald Trump, who has joined fellow Republicans in accusing Mr. Biden of hypocrisy on the issue.

Ya think? Biden tried to smooth it over by explaining how seriously he takes classified data:

“People know I take classified documents and classified material seriously," Pres. Biden told reporters when asked about the classified documents found in his garage. "We’re going to see all this unfold." https://t.co/0fEvi036A3 pic.twitter.com/FQ92KkKQ0s

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) January 12, 2023

So … that’s why it was found in Biden’s garage and in some adjacent room? Six years after he left office as Vice President? That just screams serious. At the very least, and unlike the Penn Center, Biden’s home has Secret Service protection. That doesn’t justify the storage of classified documents there, but they should be able to identify anyone who might have had access to them. (It didn’t justify Mar-a-Lago either, which is one of several parallels between these cases, no matter what the media keeps trying to argue.)

It does scream serious in terms of Biden’s political and legal predicament, as well as Merrick Garland’s. This morning, CNN made that point more explicit. “The biggest question right now,” Paula Reid told Don Lemon this morning, is “is this it?” The White House is keeping very quiet about that, and that makes this a huge problem, both legally and politically:

President Biden’s legal team found a second batch of classified government records following the initial discovery of classified documents at his former think tank office in Washington this past fall https://t.co/0gEzSl22OU pic.twitter.com/InDJONQ9c3

— CNN (@CNN) January 12, 2023

Even at just two instances of illegal document retention and mishandling, Biden and Merrick Garland face a political crisis. Senior DoJ correspondent Evan Perez told Jake Tapper yesterday evening that the White House doesn’t want a special counsel appointed that could drag this out, but the discovery of the second set of unsecured classified documents probably leaves Garland no choice.

That will be especially true if the information in the documents exposes key intel sources and methods, Perez notes:

TAPPER: And we are back with our politics lead. Attorney General Merrick Garland is now weighing whether to open a full blown criminal investigation after 10 classified documents were inappropriately transferred and then found in a private office used by Joe Biden after he served as vice president and before he launched his 2020 campaign. We do not know who had access to these classified documents for the six years they were in that private office.

CNN’s senior justice correspondent Evan Perez joins me now live. Evan, what do we know about any next steps here?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jake, one of the big questions that hangs over this is whether the attorney general should order a full scale investigation, a full blown investigation of this now that the initial preliminary work review was being — that was being done by John Lausch, the Trump appointee, U.S. attorney in Chicago. Now that that has been completed, Lausch has briefed the attorney general and the leadership of the DOJ.

And so now, the attorney general has to the side what are the next steps. And those of course could include just launching a new full scale investigation. It also could be to appoint a special counsel to look at this, Jake. And you know, of course, there’s already a special counsel looking at the handling of classified documents, the investigations of Donald Trump.

There’s still John Durham out there. We are starting to joke that the Department of Justice is the department of special counsels. So this is something obviously that is a very big concern for the White House. They do not want to see a special counsel in this. They like to see this wrapped up instead.

TAPPER: And, Evan, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat and Republican, had sent a letter to the director of national intelligence asking for access to these documents, a bipartisan request. Is that normal procedure?

PEREZ: It is normal procedure. I mean, you certainly saw that I think on the Senate side during the Trump administration. You saw an effort to try to be bipartisan in investigating the handling of things like this.  What you often see, Jake, a different story in the House. And what you might see here is that the intelligence community is involved with this effort to see whether any sources or methods may have been exposed or damaged as a result of the handling of these documents. Of course, Jake, you know that putting these documents in a place where there weren’t necessarily up to the standards of security and a private office here in Washington is something that is very, very concerning to the intelligence community. So, before this is wrapped up, the FBI, the intelligence community,
will want to know who might have had access to those offices. Also, are there any documents anywhere else that Joe Biden has not accounted for?

Again, what happens if we find yet another such tranche of purloined documents? The White House seems more definitive that they have searched all possible locations, but then again, it’s not like they have been terribly forthcoming on these developments either. One major question in this scandal is why none of this got disclosed when it was discovered just days before the midterm elections, while Biden and Democrats were using the Mar-a-Lago documents scandal as campaign fodder against Republicans.

Actually, that’s not so much a question as it is a line of questioning. House Republicans will probably insist on asking Garland for answers to that, as well as other issues of equity in enforcement of statutes forbidding the mishandling of classified information.

Jonathan Turley has a few more questions:

There are some obvious explanations for the documents being present in the office, particularly given Biden’s work on a book that discussed his work in some of the referenced countries like Ukraine. However, even that explanation raises more questions. For example, Biden left office as vice president in 2017 and had an office at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia after finishing his term until 2019. On February 8, 2018, the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement says that it opened its doors in Washington, D.C.

So if these documents were removed when Biden left office, where were they in the prior year and were they moved repeatedly before they ended up in the Washington office? This does not appear a “one-and-done” mistake. Rather documents may have been at various locations over a five year period.

Otherwise, Biden would have had to request and receive classified information at some point in the five years outside of a secure location.

Now that we have a second batch of documents, there is an increasing concern that classified documents were distributed or divided among different offices. This also means that an even greater array of individuals may have had access to such documents at different locations over the five-year period. …

Democrats and the media are eager to wave this away and move on. But, as the statements of Garland and Biden show, there are many questions that need answering. The discovery of new classified documents only magnifies those unanswered questions.

Especially the question that Paula Reid asked: “Is this it?”