Recent revelations that Joe Biden has also held onto classified documents after leaving office has Donald Trump and various Republicans crowing.
Politically, the voters may not see the difference between how Biden and Trump have handled government records that should not have left the White House or their executive branch offices.
It is, though, a false equivalence.
Based on what is known at this point, the volume of documents and, more specifically, each man’s response to being caught with them are worlds apart.
The exact number of classified materials obtained from Biden’s office and home have not been specified other than his attorney’s claim that they were a “small number.” In Trump’s case, the number is around 300, but another 11,000 or so unclassified government documents to which he had no legal claim were also recovered from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
Also unlike Trump, Biden or his staff volunteered to turn over the documents that the president claims he inadvertently kept from his days as vice president. Trump resisted turning over the records for months, acting as if they were his personal documents, contrary to federal law enacted almost a half-century ago in reaction to the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon. It took a search warrant to obtain all the records in Trump’s possession, including a huge batch that was retrieved even after his lawyers certified falsely that all records had been returned.
Trump’s intent to defy the 1978 Presidential Records Act has been established; nothing close to that has been shown in Biden’s case.
Gail Collins, a columnist for The New York Times, succinctly captured the difference between the current president’s culpability and that of his predecessor: “Stupid sloppiness versus a deliberate attempt to pile up mountains of secret official papers and hide them away from government investigators.”
Trump and many Republicans in Congress will try to blur the distinction. They will use Biden’s predicament to further their argument that the former president has been held to a higher standard than the Democrats who served before and after him. Trump’s considerable legal troubles will also be deflected in part by sharing the distinction with Biden of being under investigation by separate independent counsels to see if any laws were broken in their handling of government documents.
Even if Biden is cleared legally, he has already been proven guilty of breaking a rule of politics, writes Zeke Miller, who covers the White House for The Associated Press. “Check your closet for skeletons before you complain about someone else’s.”
Biden did a lot of harrumphing about Trump following the raid at Mar-a-Lago, calling his predecessors actions “irresponsible.” Now those words are being thrown back at the Democrat.
There’s also the matter of explaining the two-month gap between the initial discovery of the records and the White House’s public disclosure of the same. It appears that Biden and his advisers opted to keep the embarrassing information under wraps until they got past the midterm elections, in which Democratic congressional candidates did better than forecast. It might not have been a full-blown coverup, but it still doesn’t look good.
