Trump gets breather after discovery of classified material from Biden's house and office

New Delhi: Discovery of top secret documents from the office and personal residence of US President Joe Biden has taken the sting out of the probe against former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified papers.

Justice Department announced a special counsel to probe the matter. Trump too is facing a special counsel investigation in connection with the recovery of classified material from his Florida residence. It’s an interesting time in US politics when the sitting President and his immediate predecessor- both are under probe headed by special counsels.

It seems that there is more to come in the matter. On Saturday, White House special counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement that in all, six pages of documents with classification markings were found at Biden’s Wilmington residence in Delaware.

Now, this is troublesome since the White House had earlier said that only one page was found there.

Legally speaking, there are marked differences at the moment between the Trump and Biden classified documents cases.

In the case of Trump, it was the FBI which conducted a court-approved search of the former President’s Mar-a-Lago Club and residence. The FBI recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. 

The recovery took place after Trump’s aides had claimed that they had returned everything they could find. But in Biden’s case, his team voluntarily informed authorities following the discovery of classified documents.

But, the discovery has given Trump a breather no doubt. Especially the timeline of recovery in Biden’s case is very important.

The first recovery was made at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, where Biden maintained a private office after leaving the office of Vice President, on November 2, just before the midterm elections. But the discovery was kept under wraps until the top law officer of the country, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former US Attorney Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate the matter. 

Trump has alleged that the Justice Department deliberately kept quiet about the discovery in order not to affect the congressional elections. The elections turned out to be problematic for Trump and Republicans as Democrats managed to hold on to the upper house Senate and got only a razor-thin majority in the lower house.

Now, the additional recovery of classified documents at the residence of Biden is going to complicate the matter further for Democrats.

Biden is already frustrated. His aides have claimed that Biden doesn’t have any criminal exposure in the matter as it was just clumsiness of aides in handling documents but he knows that Republicans are definitely going to draw parallels between his and Trump’s case.

"Another faux pas by the Biden administration by treating law differently based upon your political beliefs. Treats President Trump one way but treats President Biden a whole different way," this was Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. They have sniffed a breach in the Democratic wall. The Republican House Judiciary members have sent a letter to the Attorney General announcing their inquiry into the handling of the documents.

This is definitely going to give Trump some political space as he was gasping for breath after the underwhelming performance by the Republicans in the mid-term polls.