While former President Donald Trump faces an array of federal charges in two separate cases as a result of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, no one has yet been charged in a separate special counsel probe of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents while he was vice president.
In January 2023, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur special counsel to investigate the Biden case.
In November 2022, Obama-era documents with classified markings were discovered at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania’s Washington D.C. office.
The documents were found by Biden’s attorneys, and a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee told CNN that “we now know the classified documents were not kept in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center as the Biden team has asserted.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation also discovered classified documents in a garage at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del., in January 2023, prompting Garland to appoint the special counsel. In a January 10 press conference, Biden said he was “surprised” that the documents were found and that “he did not know what was in the documents.”
In August 2022, the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents. Trump was charged in June 2023 with 37 counts for mishandling classified information as part of special counsel Smith’s investigation. Trump was later hit with additional charges in that case, and indicted in August 2023 on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, which also stems from Smith’s investigation.
Trump was arraigned at the federal courthouse in Washington D.C. on Thursday on the Jan. 6 related changes. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After the FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the agents gathered documents together for a series of photographs that were widely distributed to the media. By contrast, research by Just the News shows that after classified documents were discovered both at the Biden Penn Center and Biden’s garage, no such publicity photos were made or distributed.
