New analysis highlights the 'big difference' between Trump and Biden’s classified documents cases

11 January 2023

Biden: Trump's mishandling of transition is 'nothing short' of 'irresponsibility'

As Republicans attempt to capitalize on the latest news coverage about classified documents involving President Joe Biden, a new analysis is explaining how this situation differs vastly from former President Donald Trump's situation.

Shortly after reports began circulating, former President Donald Trump immediately took to his social media platform Truth Social to challenge the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to launch an investigation into the sitting president.

On Monday, he wrote, “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified."

Other Republicans also echoed similar sentiments. But according to Yahoo! News reporter Evan Johnson, legal experts have made it clear that the circumstances are quite different. In the analysis, he offered detailed information and perspectives from multiple legal experts to explain why.

"Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University and a nationally recognized authority on national security law, agreed, saying that the way officials respond to the matter is one of the most important things when it comes to security violations," Johnson wrote.

"Much of the investigation in the Trump case has centered not so much on the documents themselves or Trump’s possession of them, but on what’s been described in court filings as possible obstruction of the efforts to recover all of the documents believed to have been taken by Trump," he added. "As of yet, no such allegation has been made in the Biden matter, though the investigation is still ongoing."

“There’s a big difference between, say, taking proper remedial action,” Waxman said, “[and] stymieing efforts to secure documents and assess risk.”

Johnson also pointed out the difference in disclosures where Trump and Biden are concerned.

"The unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago came only after more than a year of tussling between Trump’s attorneys, the National Archives and the Department of Justice, in which the National Archives made multiple requests for Trump to return what it considered to be sensitive material that should have been turned over to the Archives by law," he wrote.

Johnson added, "Biden’s attorneys, on the other hand, self-reported and voluntarily handed over the classified material to the National Archives immediately after they realized what they had found."

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