Bidens attorneys found classified documents and other government records at his residence and office recently that he used after he transitioned out of the white house where he served as the VP. This raises a law compliance issue.
From what I see, Biden's attorney and counsel did the right thing to immediately notify the archives every time documents were found. The archives did the right thing to notify the justice department promptly. The justice department did the right thing to do an initial investigation and based on that then name a special counsel. Bidens team fully cooperated with the justice department and the archives and will continue to cooperate with the special council. On Jan 21, the FBI, on the invitation and approval of Biden's attorneys, conducted a thorough search of Biden's home and found some more documents. Biden and his team did the right thing to hold back making a full public disclosure throughout since there was an active justice department investigation but acknowledged it when reported by media. They had a tough call to make balancing protecting the integrity of a justice department investigation with public transparency. Some people have criticized that more transparency earlier should have been done but it is a legal judgement call. There was I am sure some political judgement involved and some wishful thinking that this will all go away quickly too but that is incidental.
The only question is how they ended up where they did. Did Biden or his aides carelessly or intentionally mishandle the docs? Were the contents revealed corruptly by anyone since he left office while in storage? That will take a long time to investigate by the special council and till then we won't know. But special councils have a habit of veering far from the original investigation. It really depends on the nature of the special council how this unfolds.
Those last days as VP were a blur of phone calls, meetings, farewell events and visits to Ukraine and Switzerland. As he wrapped up his tenure as vice president in January 2017, Joseph R. Biden Jr. was packing in as much as he could. The packing and moving of boxes were chaotic and hurried. Biden’s whirlwind final days as vice president had aides scrambling to close his White House office.
It is likely the Trump investigation on documents will conclude before Bidens. His case is far worse and clearcut and includes big obstruction charges and there appears to be good evidence it was intentional taking and intentional concealment and intentional sharing and intentional obstruction. The two document cases have special councils and documents in common but little else. They are vastly different.
VP Pence also recently announced that classified documents were found in his home. So, these cases hints to a laxness to how the Whitehouse handles classified documents in general. One thing to look at is why are classified documents not restricted to only be looked at in a super secure space with no possibility of ever getting hold of a copy that can end up in a less secure place? That would be a legitimate congressional inquiry. Harassing Biden but not Trump or Pence on this is not legitimate for congress.
One 2004 essay put the number of classified pages in existence at about 7.5 billion. In 2012, records were classified at a rate of 3 per second, making for an estimated 95 million classifications that year alone. Today, no one knows how frequently information is classified. And as of 2019, more than 4 million people were eligible to access classified information, about one-third for top secret records, the highest general designation. A major issue is that the U.S. government has a totally out-of-control system of secrets that represents a real danger to the quality of democratic government.
Early 2024 update: The special council for the Biden documents probe Robert Hur filed his final report and the case is closed. No charges were filed but he was critical of Biden and found some evidence of wrongdoing that does not rise to a chargeable crime. He made some leaps beyond the cited evidence about Biden's memory in the rest of the report that were somewhat politically damaging and inappropriate in my opinion and beyond the normal strictures special councils operate in.
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