This week, it was revealed that President Joe Biden’s personal lawyers discovered some Obama-era classified documents in an office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a Washington think tank, on Nov. 2, 2022. Biden had worked out of the office from 2017 — after he was no longer vice president — to 2019, just before he announced his candidacy for president. According to official statements, the documents were immediately turned over to the National Archives and the Department of Justice was notified. NBC News reported yesterday evening that Biden’s aides had already begun searching for additional documents; they found another batch of classified records in a separate location and turned them in.
For sure, the presence of government documents in Biden’s non-government office should be investigated to the fullest extent. If that means allowing investigators to go through that office and any other room or building Biden may have stored sensitive papers, including his residence, then that’s what should be done.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has already assigned the preliminary inquiry to John R. Lausch Jr., a U.S. attorney in Chicago appointed by Trump. However, in the spirit of fairness, Garland should appoint a special counsel, similar to the one looking into Trump, to oversee the entire investigation.
It also means that the Department of Justice should be at least as transparent about this probe as it was into the search for documents Trump had taken from the White House. The DOJ and Biden administration shouldn’t have waited two months before revealing the situation. It’s not a good look for anyone.
Many will compare this situation to the revelation that former President Donald Trump had taken hundreds of classified and top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago. But they are not the same.
The key differences are in the sheer scale of “misplacement” and the amount of cooperation from each president’s team.
The former president took hundreds of documents, ranging from classified to top secret, and lied about returning them. Trump had absconded with so many documents — including letters from Kim Jong-Un and Barak Obama — that the National Archives sent multiple formal requests throughout 2021 for them to be returned. Then, in January 2022, the National Archives retrieved more than a dozen boxes from Mar-a-Lago containing 184 classified documents. It continued into May and June, when Trump was subpoenaed and had to turn over an additional 38 sensitive documents — at which point Trump’s team insisted it had handed over everything.
Cue the August FBI search of Trump’s residence, which found 103 more classified documents plus thousands of unclassified papers and photos that should have also been given to the National Archives. Most of the records had been stored in Mar-a-Lago’s basement — along with beach chairs and umbrellas — and a few in Trump’s office. But that wasn’t the end of it — two more classified documents were discovered in November in a West Palm Beach storage unit after a judge ordered Trump’s team to search other locations documents may have been stored.
Compare that to the current situation: The National Archives did not instigate an investigation. Biden’s lawyers found a currently undisclosed number of documents marked “classified” in a locked office closet, then immediately and voluntarily handed them over to the archives. The National Archives, in turn, notified the DOJ, and so far Biden’s team has been cooperative.
The investigation into any records or items Biden may have improperly taken with him from his time as vice president should continue, and the president and his team must continue to cooperate. But, at this time, it is a wild exaggeration to say these two situations are the same.
