Like Trump, Biden Had a Private Stash of Secret Documents, but It Was Much Less Impressive

Six days before the midterm elections, the White House reported on Monday, President Joe Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number of documents with classified markings,” dating to his time as vice president, in an office at a Washington, D.C., think tank that he used from mid-2017 until the beginning of his 2020 campaign. Whoops.

Former President Donald Trump predictably seized upon that revelation as evidence that the FBI’s investigation of the government records he kept when he left the White House in January 2021 is much ado about nothing. “When is the FBI going to raid the many houses of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump asked on Truth Social. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”

Trump was, of course, alluding to the FBI’s August 8 search of his residence at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort, which turned up thousands of government documents, including 103 marked as classified. That was in addition to 184 classified documents found in 15 boxes that Trump turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in January 2022 and 38 that his lawyers produced in response to a federal subpoena last June. Trump also was alluding to his claim that none of those documents remained classified, thanks to a “standing order” he supposedly issued as president, his decision to take the records with him, or possibly a transformation he accomplished mentally “by thinking about it.”

Biden’s retention of classified material is significant, and the timing of the Justice Department’s acknowledgment that it is looking into the incident is fishy. “The White House statement said that it ‘is cooperating’ with the department,” The New York Times notes, “but did not explain why Mr. Biden’s team waited more than two months to announce the discovery of the documents, which came a week before the midterm congressional elections when the news would have been an explosive last-minute development.” But contrary to what Trump implies, there seem to be substantial differences between what he did and what Biden did, although proving that either amounted to crimes would be a tall order.

According to a statement by Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, Biden’s lawyers found the classified records on November 2 “in a locked closet” while packing up files in an office that he no longer uses at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. That same day, they notified NARA, which picked up the records the next morning. Sauber did not say exactly how many classified documents Biden had in the office. There were “roughly 10,” according to an anonymous source cited by The Washington Post. Nor did Sauber specify what level of classification applied to the records.

The documents “were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives,” Sauber said. “Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated wit