The difference between the Biden and Trump classified document discovery

Just as former President Donald Trump is in the midst of an investigation and facing possible indictment for storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office, news has surfaced that classified documents from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found at the University of Pennsylvania’s central location for Biden when he left office.

There are 10 classified documents at the Penn Biden Center, among them “Obama-era intelligence memos and briefing materials covering topics including Ukraine, Iran and Britain,” CNN reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The White House said in a statement that Biden’s personal attorney found the document in a locked cabinet in November 2022.

Unlike Trump, who has refused repeated government requests to turn over larger documents, Biden’s team returned them to the government without being asked. But that still leaves the question of how and why they came in the first place.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has tasked John Lausch, a U.S. attorney based in Chicago – and a Trump appointee – with investigating the Biden issue further, and has determined whether to recommend him as special counsel.

In theory, this investigation should proceed separately from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the documents at Mar-a-Lago. In practice, politics can get in the way. For months, reporters covering the Trump investigation have reported some skepticism within the FBI about whether Trump’s behavior merited indictment. This news increases the pressure to make sure that any case the DOJ brings against Trump is bulletproof.

The Biden Center’s document investigation, briefly described

Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, the University of Pennsylvania announced that former Vice President Joe Biden would lead “a new center focused primarily on diplomacy, foreign policy, and national security” – the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The center secured office space in Washington, DC, near the Capitol and opened in 2018.

According to an intern interviewed by UPenn’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, about 15 people worked there earlier that year, on issues such as writing speeches for Biden and helping him organize public conversations with former world leaders to be held on the Penn campus. The American Prospect also interviewed an intern, who said Biden had his own office but was “never there.” Longtime Biden aides (and current administration officials) Steve Ricchetti and Tony Blinken took center stage at various points. But Biden took a leave of absence from the center when he announced his presidential campaign in April 2019, and has not returned.

Then, in November 2022, according to statement by White House lawyer Richard Sauber, Biden’s personal attorney was preparing to vacate the central office space, when they found “what appeared to be Obama-Biden administration records” in a locked cabinet, “including several documents with confidential signatures.” Per Sauber, Biden’s team notified the National Archives of the discovery the same day and returned the document the following morning.

As for the documents, a source told CNN’s Jamie Gangel, Marshall Cohen, and Evan Perez that the 10 documents are dated between 2013 and 2016, and include “US intelligence memos and briefing materials covering topics including Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom.” Personal Biden family documents related to Beau Biden’s funeral were also in the box, according to a CNN source, and some were in “envelopes with markings indicating they are personal documents of the former vice president.”

So at this point there are various explanations, from mild to less mild, depending on what the document actually is, how it came about, and the evidence of Biden’s personal involvement. But initial reports on the documents suggest they dealt with intelligence on politically sensitive countries.

Politico sources claim Biden recently told aides he didn’t know the classified document was at the center. But Garland in November asked U.S. Attorney Lausch to investigate further. Lausch was Trump’s appointee, but two Democratic senators from Illinois previously asked Biden to keep him as U.S. attorney to complete the ongoing investigation.

News of this situation has only become public, and so far there has been no report on whether Justice Department investigators think there was a criminal violation. So right now, we’re still missing a lot of facts about what happened and have only speculation to go on.

The Trump Mar-a-Lago document investigation, briefly described

The Trump documents controversy, on the other hand, began when the National Archives realized, a few months after Trump left office, that various documents from the administration that had to be archived under the Presidential Records Act had disappeared. A long back-and-forth: Trump eventually returned some boxes containing classified material, the Archives thought he was still holding some and asked the FBI to get involved, and Trump apparently refused a grand jury subpoena to turn over the documents. .

So in August, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, and found dozens of other classified documents there, according to prosecutors. We still don’t know exactly what’s in the document – it’s a problem to publicly assess the strength of a case like this, because the information remains classified.

But the Washington Post reported that some of the documents contained “highly sensitive intelligence about Iran and China,” including details of Iran’s missile program, and prosecutors expressed concern that the information could jeopardize human intelligence sources.

But reports say DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents working on the investigation disagree on the strength of the case.

According to a Washington Post report in December, the FBI initially wasn’t sure it wanted to take the case, and some agents were “not sure” they had the chance to pursue it. And in October, Bloomberg News reported that some “internal critics” at the FBI questioned why Trump would be indicted when Hillary Clinton was not in her own classified information investigation. (Clinton has some classified information in an email chain sent to her personal email account she uses for work; Trump has paper documents in a box at Mar-a-Lago.)

Furthermore, another Washington Post story suggests that even more outrageous and speculative theories about Trump’s motives for keeping secret documents are unfounded, in the eyes of researchers. However, he believes the motive was “egoism and the desire to hold onto the material as a trophy or memento.”

That won’t get people off the hook for violating classified information laws, but it’s certainly less of a clear-cut threat to national security than, say, trying to sell documents would be.

The difference between the two cases so far

There is a core similarity here in that classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center and Mar-a-Lago. There are also many differences, as well as other problems where there is not enough information to know what is the same and what is different:

• There are 10 documents with classified marks at the Penn Biden Center; over 300 were at Mar-a-Lago.
• Some of the Mar-a-Lago documents are reportedly highly sensitive, involving intelligence about Iran and China. Some of the Biden Center documents are intelligence briefing materials on politically sensitive countries like Iran and Ukraine.
• Biden’s team claimed to have returned the documents as soon as they found them, volunteering them to the National Archives without being asked. Trump, when asked by the Archives to return the missing documents, gave some but fought hard against others, including reportedly having some boxes moved to hide them from government officials.
• Trump insists secret documents be kept at Mar-a-Lago. The extent of Biden’s involvement in maintaining the document is unclear, but it was reportedly found among other personal documents.
• Investigators believe Trump’s motive for withholding the documents was “ego,” while it remains unclear how the Biden Center documents got there.

Prosecutors will consider all of these topics to determine whether to bring charges. But politics will also be difficult to avoid. There were already internal skeptics about Trump’s case before the Biden news broke, and he will have allies equipped with powerful subpoenas in the GOP-led House of Representatives. Now they will no doubt be more active in criticizing what they perceive to be double standards — and Garland and Smith may think harder before charging Trump.