Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz reacted to the FBI's discovery of six new classified "items" during a 12-hour search Friday of President Joe Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, residence on his popular podcast, "The Verdict."

Following the search, Biden attorney Bob Bauer said in a statement that several of the "items" dated back to Biden's days in the Senate.

In his podcast on Monday, Cruz called on the Justice Department and the FBI to expand their search for classified documents to the University of Delaware, where approximately 1,850 boxes of Biden's Senate records currently reside.

“Let me tell you what the next step in this scandal is going to be," the senator said. "The next step in this scandal is going to be, OK, if Biden’s Senate documents include classified documents outside of classified settings -- which is illegal -- how many more classified documents are illegally in his Senate papers?

"And here’s where this matters in particular, which is the University of Delaware has more than 1,850 boxes of records from Joe Biden’s Senate tenure which he gave to the University of Delaware.”

Cruz continued, “Now the University of Delaware presumably does not have them in a SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility]. It does not have them in a secure location.

"During the 2020 campaign, there was a concerted media effort to try to get access to those documents in particular, there were allegations of sexual harassment raised against Joe Biden, and the media wanted to examine the documents on those allegations of sexual harassment.

"The University of Delaware has said, ‘Nope.' They’re not releasing the documents to anybody until two years after Biden retires from public life."

Then came his call to action: “I am right now calling for the Department of Justice, for the FBI to examine all 1,850 boxes of those Senate records to see how many additional classified documents are in those records.

"The answer should be none. But given Biden’s pattern, we should have zero reason to have any confidence that there are not multiple classified documents within those 1,850 boxes of Senate records.”

The comments start around the 11-minute mark:

Biden's classified documents scandal has escalated spectacularly since CBS News' Jan. 9 report that his lawyers had found 10 classified documents inside a closet in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington on Nov. 2.

We quickly learned that a second batch of classified material had been discovered Dec. 20 in a separate undisclosed location, which was later revealed to be the locked garage of Biden’s Wilmington home.

Another classified document was found inside the residence on Jan. 11, followed by five more the next day.

This brings us to the six classified "items" that the FBI unearthed during Friday's search.

Attorney General Merrick Garland took the surprising step of appointing a special counsel to investigate Biden's mishandling of classified documents. But considering he’d already taken the extraordinary step of ordering an FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence to retrieve “sensitive” material, his failure to appoint a Biden special counsel for the same offense would have been impossible to defend.

How many more classified documents are out there?

Will the FBI search Biden's Rehoboth, Delaware, beach house next? It should.

Of course, the "most transparent administration ever" has repeatedly refused to provide any details about the content of the classified material.

If a connection to Hunter Biden can be made in this case, searches of his residences should be ordered as well. The president's son, who is under federal investigation, has said he lived in the Wilmington home off and on following his April 2017 divorce, the New York Post reported.

Shortly after news of the first batch of classified documents broke, the inevitable comparisons to Trump's mishandling of classified materials began. Liberals declared the situations were very different. The consensus was that Trump's case was far worse. They pointed to Trump's obstruction of the DOJ's efforts to retrieve the documents and the sheer number of the items involved.

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But this investigation is breaking bad for Biden, and it's beginning to look much worse. Trump was the president and he had the authority to declassify documents. A vice president can only declassify documents that he has classified. (See former President Barack Obama's 2009 executive order.) Since we don't know any specifics about the documents found to date, we can't speak to this.

We do know that senators are not authorized to declassify information and some of the documents found date back to his tenure in the Senate.

Moreover, Trump's documents were contained in a secure facility on a property that was under the protection of the U.S. Secret Service. Biden's have been found in miscellaneous unsecured locations, including a storage facility in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington that was "overseen" by the University of Pennsylvania, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail.

Cruz's call for the FBI to search the material being housed at the University of Delaware is entirely appropriate and should be done immediately.

Who knows what might turn up?

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.