Early Thursday afternoon, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel to examine Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, after a relatively small number of them from his time as vice president were found in two locations. In a statement, Robert Hur, the veteran prosecutor (and former Trump-appointed US attorney) assigned to the job, said he would run the investigation with “fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment.” As Donald Trump and his allies had been demanding this very thing since the news of the documents broke, we can now be reasonably assured they will take a breath, acknowledge they got what they wanted, and, in a quiet, reflective moment, come to see how very different the two cases of presidential-document-handling really are.
Yeah, just kidding. That’s obviously never going to happen and we know this because that is very much not how Republicans roll. Instead, they will continue to traffic in absurd conspiracy theories about what Biden was doing with the documents and, we’re assuming, cry unfairness unless Garland sends the president to Gitmo until the conclusion of Hur’s investigation and/or has the FBI strip-search him on the South Lawn of the White House, because, hey, he might have top secret material on him.
Perhaps more crucially, the GOP will never, ever admit that—based on what we know at this point—what Biden did and Trump did are very different.
For one thing, there’s the volume. The Biden administration said that a “small number” of documents had been found at each location, and, according to CBS News, approximately 10 documents with classified markings were found at one of them. For his predecessor, the number is in the hundreds.
Even more important than that is the way the presence of the documents was brought to light. In Biden’s case, the administration said his team informed the National Archives of the situation, and immediately at that. When it came to Trump? The timeline went like this:
- In the spring of 2021, the National Archives, per The New York Times, “realized…that historically prominent files were missing and asked Mr. Trump to return them.”
- In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago, and found that, among them, were ones marked “top secret.”
- Shortly thereafter, Trump—who, per The Washington Post, personally packed the boxes—reportedly tried to get one of his attorneys to tell the government that all requested materials had been turned over. The lawyer in question refused to do so, on account of not being sure if what Trump wanted him to say was actually true.
- Spoiler alert for those who haven’t watched the show yet: It wasn’t.
- In May, the government issued a grand jury subpoena for the additional classified documents. Some were turned over in June, but others were not—yet a Trump attorney reportedly signed a statement saying all requested documents had been returned.
- Again, spoiler: They hadn’t.
- Having become increasingly frustrated with Team Trump’s ability to ever tell the truth about anything, ever, the FBI eventually obtained a court-authorized warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for the remaining documents, having established that there was probable cause to believe they’d find evidence of a crime.
- In August, the FBI officially searched the place and found more than 100 additional documents with classified markings on them (with at least one that reportedly contained information about a foreign government’s nuclear capabilities).
- In the fall, the Justice Department got a sinking sense that Trump still had documents he wasn’t supposed to have, an inkling that turned out to be correct because…
- In December 2022—and, remember, it was in the spring of 2021 that the government first became aware there was a problem—the Post reported that lawyers for the 45th president uncovered “at least two items marked classified after an outside team hired by Trump searched a storage unit in West Palm Beach, Fla., used by the former president.”
