Mr. Biden's Latest

Former President Trump has a penchant for making life much more difficult for himself than it needs to be. As is well-known he's currently in hot water for having stored documents classified Top Secret at his home in Mar-a-Lago. It's a crime for anyone to have classified documents in a private residence or office, and it's a much greater offense if the offender is a Republican. It's a crime against humanity if the miscreant is Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton's former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, was caught in 2003 pirating documents out of the National Archives in his socks, documents he subsequently destoyed, and received little more than a couple of "naughty, naughtys" from the authorities. Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, was discovered to have classified material on her phone and home internet server. She professed girlish naivete, was subjected to a bit of finger-wagging by the FBI, and sent on her merry way.

Donald Trump, however, is being threatened with a prison sentence.

Mr. Trump's successor in the White House, Joe Biden, went on 60 Minutes in late September and asked, with righteous indignation, how anyone, meaning Mr. Trump, could possibly be so irresponsible as to take classified information out of a government facility. To do so, Mr. Biden implied, is the zenith of recklessness and foolhardiness.

Now we learn that the self-righteous Mr. Biden has himself been stashing Top Secret documents willy-nilly about his various private offices and residences like a squirrel storing up acorns for the winter. Mr. Trump must be gloating.

Jim Geraghty provides a few details:

Back on November 2, 2022 — before the midterm elections — one of Biden’s personal lawyers, Patrick Moore, was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located in D.C., going through old papers from Biden’s time as vice president.

We haven’t gotten much of an explanation as to why, two years into Biden’s presidency, this was happening. Did the coverage of former president Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago spur someone on Biden’s team to worry that classified documents had gotten mixed in with Biden’s non-classified personal papers?

Did that make one or more of Biden’s staffers belatedly realize they had likely demonstrated the same irresponsibility?

The Washington Post reports, quoting people familiar with the matter, that “some of the classified material found in the Biden Penn Center office was marked top secret.”

Recall that the presence of security at a location, whether in the form of security guards, locks, or the U.S. Secret Service, does not mean it is considered secure for the storage of classified information. Classified documents are not supposed to leave government buildings, period.

Then, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, on December 20, President Biden’s personal counsel notified U.S. Attorney John Lausch that additional documents bearing classification markings were identified in the garage of the president’s private residence in Wilmington, Del.

And this past weekend, President Biden’s lawyers found six more pages of documents with classification markings at the Wilmington residence.

The argument from the Biden team is that this situation is completely different from former president Trump’s because the current president and his people aren’t hiding anything. And yet, these documents were found before the midterms, and no one revealed any of this to the public until January 9.

What affect this will have on Mr. Biden's presidency is uncertain, but it doesn't help any politician when at worst they look like a criminal and at best they look like a buffoon.