Republicans seized on revelations that several classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found in his former private office to create cover for former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of secret records.
Republicans seized on revelations that several classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found in his former private office to create cover for former President Donald Trump’s hoarding of secret records.
The disclosures Monday about the material found last fall spun up an immediate political storm at a time when Trump is in increasing legal peril. The new GOP House majority is meanwhile rushing to undermine investigations against him and unleashing a wave of counter investigations against the current president.
But there are clear distinctions between the two cases.
The new controversy so far appears to be on a smaller scale than the more than 100 classified documents – some bearing the highest designations of government secrecy – taken from Trump’s resort at Mar-a-Lago after a court-approved search by FBI agents. And Biden appears to be cooperating with the National Archives and the Justice Department in a way that Trump failed to do and unlike the former president he is not being investigated for possible obstruction of justice.
But Trump, who brands attempts to make him face accountability for his conduct in office and afterward as political victimization, sought to capitalize on Biden’s discomfort over the documents in a post on his Truth Social network.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” he wrote.
New House Oversight Chairman James Comer told CNN: “This is (a) further concern that there is a two-tiered justice system.”
New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also moved quickly to respond to the discovery of the documents in an office used by Biden after he left the vice presidency.
“Oh, really? They just now found them after all these years,” he told CNN. “What has he said about the other president having classified documents?”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked the US attorney in Chicago to review the material, some of which bore the marking “sensitive compartmentalized information” – showing that it came from intelligence sources.
Fairness and respect for the law dictate that Biden should answer many of the same questions that Trump is facing, regarding whether he was entitled to the records, why they were not previously turned over, whether they were securely stored and how they ended up in his office in the first place.
Critics will also wonder why Biden didn’t immediately disclose the discovery of less than a dozen documents last fall to the public, given the huge sensitivity of the Justice Department probe of Trump on a similar question. And the president will be sure to face accusations of hypocrisy given his sharp criticisms that Trump did not take the proper steps to secure classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Still, even if there are adequate answers to these issues, any distinctions in the severity of the Biden and Trump documents will be obliterated in the political torrent that is already stirring and with conservative media likely to draw false equivalencies between the two cases.
The report offers an immediate opening for Trump as he seeks to dodge culpability for his behavior and claims he’s a victim of persecution to thwart his 2024 campaign. The former president is a master at turning one incident into an entire campaign narrative – as he did with former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016.
