Nowhere is the Republican talent for drawing false equivalencies better displayed than in the ongoing classified documents episodes of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The pair of cases contain but a single similarity — neither man should have retained the files.
Among the glaring differences are the sheer numbers of documents. There are more than 10,000 in Trump’s case, at least 300 of them labeled classified. To date, fewer than 20 have been found in Biden’s possession. The massive number of pages retained by Trump suggests that his actions were intentional, while the few in Biden’s possession suggests the opposite.
An equally striking difference is that Biden, through his attorneys, voluntarily returned the documents to the National Archives, which evidently hadn’t noticed they were missing. In contrast, Trump fought to the bitter end in his mad efforts to keep the files. Presently, the hypocrisy caucus feigns shock that Biden’s attorneys were allowed to return the documents without FBI oversight. But the Department of Justice allowed Trump the same courtesy for months until it finally was forced to obtain a search warrant to get the documents it knew were at Mar-a-Lago.
Growing evidently more desperate to worm his way out of another self-imposed legal crisis, this week Trump claimed that he had retained the classified folders because they were “cool keepsakes.” This would be a great time for White House staff to check on the whereabouts of the James K. Polk humidor.
Among other obvious differences (to all but the reddest of the red hatters), Trump sued the government in hopes of keeping the documents. Biden did not. Trump claimed the records were his. Biden did not. Trump attacked the Department of Justice and the FBI on social media for carrying out a legal search warrant. Biden did not, because no warrant was needed. And Trump has been reduced to spewing deranged rants about the materials having been “planted” by the FBI, while Biden has never exhibited clinically paranoid tendencies.
Another major difference between the two cases relates to the character of the men. There is no reason to believe that Biden ever had any intention of allowing our enemies’ eyes to fall on classified information. The same cannot be said of Trump who previously shared highly classified documents with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during a May 2017 meeting at the White House, according to The Washington Post. At that time, a “senior U.S. official” told The Post that the disclosure might have revealed key elements of an ISIS terror plot against a U.S. ally [thought to have been Israel]. “Russia could [then] identify our sources and techniques,” the official said.
If Trump was capable of that, what might he have done with more than 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago? It would astonish all but the most gullible Americans that Trump might have had (or already has engaged in) traitorous plans, such as selling the documents to our enemies, or threatening to do so, either as leverage to escape his legal difficulties or for cold cash. There is no reason to think Biden would be capable of any such traitorous acts.
Based on what we know now, which could change, Biden’s case is a fender bender in the parking lot, while Trump’s is a 90-car pileup on the interstate, a crash he caused by going 120 miles an hour while tweeting about his own wonderfulness.
To date, it’s an absurdity to say that the two cases are equivalent. Nevertheless, Republicans twist themselves into Gordian knots as they attempt to sell us on such an impossibility. Objectively, it is the glaring absence of equivalence that illustrates the threat to national security that was, and might yet be, posed by Trump’s purposeful document theft, while Biden’s blunder gives every indication of having been unintentional and benign.
Joseph Wyatt is a Gazette-Mail contributing columnist and emeritus professor at Marshall University. Reach him at wyatt@marshall.edu.
