How the Biden-Trump classified documents cases are different

BBC News:

The revelation that aides to Joe Biden discovered a handful of classified documents as they were moving boxes out of the president’s Washington-based think tank offices has the potential to be a political headache.

It could also place him in legal jeopardy, although too little information is known about the documents – which dated to his time as vice-president before 2017 – and why they were not stored securely at the US National Archives to draw conclusions yet.

A Chicago-based US government attorney, John Lausch, is currently investigating the matter and has already provided a preliminary report to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Details of that report have yet to be made available.

All this hasn’t stopped Mr Biden’s critics from quickly drawing comparisons between this disclosure, first reported by CBS News, and the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into Donald Trump’s handling of classified material following his departure from the White House in January 2021.

“This is further concern that there’s a two-tier justice system within the [Department of Justice] with how they treat Republicans versus Democrats – certainly how they treat the former president versus the current president,” James Comer, the Republican in charge of the House Oversight Committee, which has launched its own review of the matter, said in a press conference.

Although there is still much to learn about the circumstances surrounding the Biden documents, there are some key differences between the two cases.