This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 23,

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's not as easy as partisans might hope to play up or down

the discovery of classified documents in the home and office of former vice president

now president Joe Biden relative to the large cash of classified documents in the

home and office of former president Donald Trump. So what are the differences and similarities between these

cases and what legal jeopardy attaches to those circumstances?

Cato's Pat Edington comments.

When we talk about the differences here, there's a difference in terms of quantity.

Mr. Trump made off with virtual truckloads of classified material, boxes and boxes of it, and he and perhaps other people

around him were not terribly cooperative with the National Archives and the Federal Bureau of

Investigation in the process, which is why we have a special counsel, you know, looking into that having said that these documents that were found in two

different locations in the case of Mr Biden his former his former, you know, Penn Biden Center think tank, and even more troublingly

in his garage in his Delaware home.

This is material that appears to date essentially from the Obama-Biden administration as far as we know.

So this material at least at his home almost certainly was there for literally years.

Now allegedly we're not talking about nearly as much in terms of quantity and we may not be talking about as much in terms of classification level.

You know I'm not sure that we have any top-secret sensitive compartment and information that's been implicated in

Biden's document gate as I'm calling it. But the similarities here are that you

you have two guys that have held the highest office in the land who both had

classified material in their possession when they were not supposed to have

classified material in their possession.

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