Secret documents found on Trump and Biden, but there are differences

Predictably, Republicans in the United States have fought back strongly the discovery of confidential documents in an office that belonged to President Biden. They quickly drew comparisons to secret documents Trump still had after his departure, parts of which were only found in August when his Florida estate was raided.

“Very concerning,” Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said of the discovery of the documents in Biden’s office. “What’s the difference between what Trump did and what we know about what Biden did?” asked Republican Congressman James Comer.

And, predictably, Democrats say they have full faith in the preliminary investigations that have been launched. But what are the facts?

CBS News reported last night that Biden’s lawyers found about ten classified documents Nov. 2 while cleaning out a former office of the president. How secret — confidential, top secret, or top secret — was not mentioned, but that it wasn’t nuclear secrets, according to a CBS source.

The documents were in a folder in a locked cabinet in Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center. That is, a think tank in Washington, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania with which the Biden family has close ties. The documents date back to the time when Biden was still vice president (2009-2017). Between 2017 and 2019 he was on the university payroll. It is not known whether he took them there or someone else. Questions about this from CBS went unanswered.

United States law requires that documents belonging to the president or vice president be turned over to the United States National Archives at the end of their term. According to Biden’s camp, this file was immediately notified of the find and the documents were handed over the next day. The file hadn’t asked for it until that point, a Biden adviser told CBS.

According to a CBS source, employees of the archive reported it to the judiciary. Attorney General Merrick Garland then asked Chicago federal prosecutor John Lausch to conduct a preliminary investigation. He probably he was chosen to avoid the appearance of impartiality. Lausch is one of two Trump-appointed federal prosecutors still serving.

One question on the table is why the news of the find did not come out through an official channel, but through a leak to the press. Did the Biden camp really want to keep it a secret, as Republicans claim?

Trump responded immediately to last night’s CBS news. “When will the FBI search John Biden’s many homes or maybe even the White House?” he wrote on his app Truth Social. He was referring to the August raid on his Florida estate.

Unlike Biden’s case, Trump was dealing not with a dozen, but with several hundred secret documents that had not been transferred to archives. Among them was a document on a foreign power’s nuclear weapons, he wrote The Washington Post. In addition, dozens of empty folders were found, including 48 marked “secret”. The question is whether the documents contained therein have been found.

Unlike the Biden camp, Trump has resisted being moved to the archives. Eventually a search warrant was required to enter the Trump estate. Before that, in January last year, Trump had already filed 184 confidential documents, 92 secret and 25 top secret documents. have to come back.

It is painful for Biden to have reacted in indignation to Trump’s secret documents in Florida in August. “How the hell is that possible?” she said on a TV show. “This is totally irresponsible.”

Keeping classified documents after leaving government office is not necessarily a criminal offence. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went unpunished after inside information was found in her private email following her departure in 2013. According to the FBI, she was negligent and not willfully.