A Watergate moment? Questions raised by classified documents | GARY COSBY JR.

Donald Trump isn’t the only president to have improperly taken classified records. This past week, we found that current President Joe Biden, when he was the vice-president and a senator, took classified records that he had no business possessing when he left office.

I wrote about the investigation into Trump’s records theft, or mistake, or whatever it was, once last year when it was found that he had boxes of records at his Mar-a-Lago estate. I said then that I had no idea how serious such a crime is, and it is a crime. There is a federal statute that dictates the handling of classified records by any administration.

I don’t think either Trump of Biden went about intentionally stashing classified records in an attempt to be nefarious or to show them to spies or any such nonsense. In all likelihood, my bet is they were just packed up with other things when the men left office and people who should have checked didn’t.

The problem with that is that every president’s team knows the law. In fact, lawyers are supposed to go through the documents being taken at the end of a term to ensure that these type things do not happen. But Biden now faces the same issue that has plagued Trump: an increasing trove of documents found at several locations.

The crime is essentially the same, and both men now face special prosecutors assigned to investigate. The Biden administration did not freely admit to the illegal possession of the documents as they want you to believe. They said nothing until news reporters heard rumors that documents had been found and turned over to authorities and reporters began pushing for answers. The Trump situation is somewhat more serious, not because he possessed the records, but because he insisted he had none, then attempted to cover up the situation and impede investigators.

That’s likely a far more serious thing than having the records. FBI agents finally had to raid Mar-a-Lago where they found a stash of the classified records. To this point, I don’t suppose anyone knows with certainty why they were there or even why Trump and his people denied they were there. For that matter, why did Biden have classified documents, and why were they spread over so many of his properties? These things are clearly marked from what news stories have reported, quoting government and former government employees who know such things.

Special prosecutors are active in investigating both cases and, for the most part, I believe nothing will come of either case, especially now that the sitting president has been implicated, though one can see the Republican controlled house salivating at the chance to impeach Biden.

This whole episode would have been over and done and no one would have ever given it another thought had Trump and his people simply said, “Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to do that” and turned the records over. So far as I know, no one has alleged that either man kept the documents with the intention of doing harm to the nation.

I suppose the funny part, and by funny I mean both ironic and hilarious, is that these two guys couldn’t be more opposite, even apart from being a Republican and a Democrat. Joe Biden is as bland as tofu while Donald Trump is like biting into a ghost pepper. Neither experience is agreeable.

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Biden is the very picture of a barely-visible career politician who was the quintessential vice-president. He smiled, waved, kissed the requisite babies and didn’t mess up Obama’s chances at the White House. That he found his own way into the president’s big chair is a debt he owes almost exclusively to Trump, an irony of epic proportions.

America had a bit too much of the fiery Trump and got a serious case of voter indigestion and so voted for Biden. After ghost pepper, one definitely needs something bland to calm one’s digestive tract.

Trump came to Washington as the man who would drain the swamp, the political outsider, the big business mogul who would save Washington from itself. I don’t think Trump even took a swipe at draining the swamp, and Biden is the personification of the swamp, happily mucking about for decades as a senator whose primary ambition seemed to continue to be a senator.

Now they are both in trouble for taking classified documents. I mean, the irony is so delicious one must revel in it. I don’t suppose either situation amounts to much, not really. After all, the Russians or the Chinese are not invading Alaska or Hawaii just now, so it appears no one actually read the stuff that either man took.

After the special prosecutors blow through a few million dollars, we will all shrug and forget about it unless someone is found to have done a real cover-up or mailed classified documents to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. If that happened, we might get a new Watergate moment, but I doubt it.

Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Questions raised by Biden's classified documents | GARY COSBY JR.