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#AceNewsDesk – Found documents, differing cases: News broke this week that classified documents had been found in an office President Joe Biden had once occupied at a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, sparking a torrent of media coverage and comments from Donald Trump.
Trump and his allies likened the documents in the Biden office to the documents the FBI seized in August at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Palm Beach, Florida, home.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump posted Jan. 9 on his social media platform, Truth Social. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”
Many details remain unknown in this evolving story. But our reporting, by Staff Writer Samantha Putterman and Senior Correspondent Lou Jacobson, so far suggests the situations are inequivalent.
Biden’s documents: Here’s what we know.
CBS News reported Jan. 9 that Biden’s lawyers on Nov. 2 found documents, about 10 marked classified, in a locked closet in Biden’s post-vice presidential office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.
The White House confirmed the story, and Biden’s team said the attorneys notified the National Archives, which took the materials Nov. 3; the Justice Department is reviewing the documents.
Biden started the think tank as a University of Pennsylvania affiliate and used the office from mid-2017 to April 2019.
Trump’s documents
Government efforts to retrieve the Trump documents started in January 2021, shortly after he left the White House and shipped presidential documents to Mar-a-Lago, which under the Presidential Records Act were to go to the National Archives.
In May 2021, National Archives officials alerted Trump’s team to documents it believed were missing from its collections and requested their return. Trump ceded the files in January 2022. But in February 2022, then-National Archives head David Ferriero told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that his agency had recovered 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago that included “items marked as classified national security information.”
In June 2022, Justice Department officials visited Mar-a-Lago and received some classified files. But the FBI, which had interviewed more Trump staffers and reviewed surveillance footage, in August searched Mar-a-Lago and found files marked classified in at least 12 boxes, along with thousands of pages of presidential records Trump shouldn’t have possessed.
How do the situations compare?
Bradley Moss, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who works on national security cases, told PolitiFact the cases share “threshold similarities” — Trump and Biden, as private citizens, had documents marked classified stored in unauthorized locations, a breach of federal law.
But Moss added, “The Biden team … immediately (notified) the government of the issue after locating the documents and returning them to government control. The Trump team time and again delayed, procrastinated, and obfuscated” efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to recover the records at Mar-a-Lago.
Keep reading the case comparison.
Documents found in Biden’s office and home had classification markings
After news broke that classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s former office in a Washington, D.C., think tank and his Delaware home, people were quick to draw comparisons between him and former President Donald Trump.
Biden and Trump are being separately investigated for possible mishandling of classified documents. Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned special counsels to both cases. But in an interview with conservative journalist John Solomon, Trump said his own situation is different from Biden’s in at least one key way.
Trump, who is running for president again, has periodically claimed that he declassified the documents he possessed. Biden, he said, could not offer the same defense:
“Well, you know, as vice president, (Biden) doesn’t have the right to declassify,” Trump said in a Jan. 10 phone interview for “No Noise,” a video show Solomon co-hosts on the right-wing website Just the News. “They shouldn’t have been there. And for that long, I guess it was seven years, or nine years now, I’m hearing. Very extended periods of time.”
We saw similar statements being shared elsewhere on social media. It was also amplified on Twitter by conservative lawmakers, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, and Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., and during a CNN interview by Rep. James Comer, R-Ky.
A look at the law shows Trump is wrong; Biden had the right to declassify documents while he was vice president.
This story is still developing, but early reporting showed that the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s office and residence differs from the seizure of documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in several ways. The Biden team said it notified the National Archives and ceded the documents immediately upon discovery, while the Trump team for months blocked efforts to recover the records at Mar-a-Lago, prompting the FBI to conduct its August search.
The official documents that govern classification and declassification are from presidential executive orders. In 2009, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13526, titled “Classified National Security Information.”
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