Washington (CNN) – President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence are all facing scrutiny regarding their potential mishandling of classified documents.
In all three cases, sensitive government materials were found in places where they shouldn’t have ended up. But there are key distinctions that differentiate each situation, including how Biden, Trump and Pence responded to the discovery of documents and how aggressively the Justice Department is currently investigating.
Here’s a breakdown of the similarities and differences between the Biden, Trump and Pence cases.
The Biden and Pence situations are similar – their lawyers discovered the classified documents, alerted the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and turned over the papers. In Biden’s case, FBI agents later found additional documents when they searched his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Trump followed a different path. After he left the White House, NARA realized that materials were missing. In May 2021, they reached out to Trump’s lawyers who negotiated for months over the voluntary return of several boxes of important documents.
The Justice Department obtained a subpoena in May 2022, a year after NARA’s initial flag, after suspecting that Trump was still holding onto some classified records. Trump gave back more files but didn’t return everything in his possession. The FBI later executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August, where more documents were found. The search was the first time in American history that a former president’s home was searched as part of a criminal investigation.
The exact number is unknown in Biden’s case. Approximately 20 classified documents had been recovered before the FBI searched Biden’s home…
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