The GOP effort to equate Biden and Trump on classified documents is working
Whether the documents found at Trump’s property at Mar-a-Lago had been declassified — either through official processes, informal ones or through the sheer power of Trump’s mind — uniquely doesn’t matter. He and his allies have been breathless in asserting Trump was allowed to retain the documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago because he had blanket declassification authority. But that doesn’t address the other concerns: that he was in possession of presidential records being demanded by the National Archives or that he failed to comply with a subpoena for documents with classification markings — importantly, not simply classified documents. Even before the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and seized more than 100 documents with classification markings, Trump and his allies were arguing he had the right to have those marked documents in his possession. When it was discovered President Biden had similarly marked documents at a think tank office he’d used and his private home, Trumpworld pivoted to the attack: Not only did Biden’s document possession functionally neutralize Trump’s possession, Biden’s situation was worse because [waving hands] Hunter Biden.
The neutralization effort, at the very least, seems to be working. Polling released by NBC News over the weekend shows that similar percentages of Americans view the Biden and Trump situations as concerning. About two-thirds of respondents said that, based on what they know, it was “very” or “somewhat” concerning that “classified government documents that should not have been there” were found at the Biden and Trump homes. Among members of each president’s party, about half held such a position.
Notice how that question itself advantages Trump’s efforts at equivalence. We don’t know which documents in the possession of either man were classified; again, classification markings do not necessarily indicate current classification status. (The Justice Department is reviewing the documents, presumably with this idea in mind.) Therefore, we don’t know whether the documents “should not have been there” — except that one president, Trump, had been asked for the records more than once and had failed to comply to a federal subpoena, despite his attorney signing a statement that he’d complied.
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