President Joe Biden was undeniably careless about leaving the vice presidency with classified documents in his possession.
It’s still a world away from Donald Trump intentionally leaving office with large numbers of classified documents and then refusing to give them back.
It’s a close call which is more irritating: the media for being so excited about getting to both-sides the documents issue, or Biden for putting us in the position of having to make this distinction in this media environment. But the facts of the Biden and Trump cases are so very different that it is definitely the most annoying to have to even explain it.
RELATED STORY: There's no comparison between classified documents at former Biden office, Trump's Mar-a-Lago stash
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There is a difference in the number of documents involved—Trump had more than 300, while all reports say Biden had far fewer. But the biggest differences are in how they came to light and the process by which they were returned to the government.
Trump held onto classified documents through a series of requests from the government for their return that escalated into a subpoena. At one point, when Trump’s lawyers turned some documents over to the FBI, they refused to allow the FBI to search remaining boxes of documents. When Trump failed to comply with the subpoena, the FBI had to get a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago.
Biden’s own lawyers discovered the first small group of documents in his former office. He was “surprised” to learn of them and his team immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration and turned them over the next day. He initiated further searches that turned up more documents, and voluntarily allowed the FBI to search his home. There’s a lot we don’t know precisely because Biden has cooperated, but the basic picture to have emerged is that he unintentionally—and, yes, carelessly—took some documents and moved to return them when he realized it.
Trump not only tried to prevent the government from regaining physical custody of the classified documents he took, he has waged simultaneous court and public relations battles insisting that he had every right to keep the documents. He has publicly attacked the FBI for going to Mar-a-Lago to get the documents he refused to return, has claimed he declassified the documents just by thinking about it, and has gone to court to fight to keep the government from investigating what exactly was in the documents he kept.
And that obstruction is where Trump really moves into the realm of possible criminality. The difference in number of documents taken and what we can infer about the degree of intention in taking them is a significant difference between Trump and Biden. But Trump’s fight to keep the documents puts him in not just another ballpark but another sport entirely.
Both Biden and Trump are under investigation by special counsels.
