So far, I haven't seen any evidence that Biden intentionally "took" classified documents. I've heard more than one former White House staffer describe the transition when administrations change hands as an extremely hectic time, with lots of scrambling, which I don't find surprising. Staffers are likely the ones quickly packing up boxes that end up having to get moved out to somewhere.
When I moved into my current home, my company at the time paid for the movers who just packed up everything. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I still have a box or two that hasn't been unpacked since I moved in and is sitting in my garage. That kind of stuff happens, although that doesn't excuse it. Intent, however, makes a huge difference under the law. I believe the National Archives tried to retrieve the documents from Trump for about 8 or 9 months. He was asked twice to return them before the subpoena was issued, none of which resulted in the documents (boxes and boxes of them) being returned. As we all now know, it eventually became necessary to have a legal warrant issued for an FBI search to go retrieve them.
Again, in Biden's case, it seems NARA didn't even realize the few pages found were missing. Apparently, Biden's attorneys contacted NARA within hours of finding them and arrangements were made to turn them over the next day. It's also possible Biden didn't even know they were there until told. The situation is being fully investigated and so far, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of a lack of cooperation on his part.
The differences in these two situations are huge and become obvious from the point it was realized that there were documents misplaced. But they're both being investigated by a special prosecutor, so if there's more to either situation, we'll find out. However, making assumptions just leads to disinformation.
One thing we can probably all agree on is that there clearly needs to be a better system in our federal government for tracking classified documents. Hopefully that will be a result of all these discussions and investigations so that this type of thing never happens again. I've also heard some say that they need to examine over-classification of documents. |