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Our political media really want you to know that Joe Biden’s classified document controversy is completely different from Donald Trump’s. And, as soon as CBS News reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland had assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review how “roughly 10” classified documents ended up in President Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, pundits and reporters began trying to mitigate the political fallout and diffuse claims of a double standard.
In today’s Politico Playbook, “courts guru” Josh Gerstein tells us that one of the distinctions “worth noting” between the two incidents is that there are fewer documents at stake, “about 300 in the Trump case versus ‘a small number’ at the think tank.”
Listen, I’m no guru, but I was unaware that there was a “small number” exemption in the laws pertaining to the mishandling of classified information. After all, Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was about to testify in front of the 9/11 Commission, stuffed copies of a single classified report down his pants in 2004. He was sentenced to two years of probation and 100 hours of community service, was stripped of his security clearance, and lost his law license. As a legal and political matter, the attempted destruction of a single report detailing the Clinton administration’s failures regarding Islamic terrorism mattered quite a bit at the time. Certainly, it’s not just a matter of numbers.
Nevertheless, Gerstein argues that it’s not unusual “for small numbers of emails or documents that are classified to get mixed in with unclassified records,” but it is “hard to argue you don’t know what’s lying around your house if there’s a lot of it.
