You have heard this story before. Confidential government documents, which were supposed to remain with the U.S. National Archives at the end of Joe Biden’s vice presidency, were found by the current president’s lawyers in one of his private offices last November.
The story you’ve heard involves another president. Dozens of confidential documents were found at Donald Trump’s property, Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, after the end of his term.
The difference between the two stories? For now, it seems that in Joe Biden’s case, the documents were accidentally discovered by his private lawyers while clearing out a private office in Washington D.C. that the current president frequently used between 2017 and 2020. According to them, there were just under a dozen documents, dated from the time Biden was vice president, found alongside his personal papers, which were immediately handed over to the National Archives.
The White House reported that it is cooperating with the Department of Justice but did not explain why the discovery of the documents, which were found in November and returned to the National Archives the following day, was only reported to the press on Monday, January 9.
President Biden stated that he has no idea about the contents of these documents, which were not considered missing nor were they being requested by the National Archives.
In Donald Trump’s case, since the end of his administration, the National Archives had been requesting documents that were missing. A Department of Justice order was necessary for the FBI to conduct a raid on the former president’s property, which resulted in the recovery of 103 confidential documents, along with a series of other official records. The case is still under investigation.
Trump wasted no time commenting on the episode involving the current president: “When will the FBI raid the many homes of Joe Biden, maybe even the White House?” he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.