“Individuals violate the Espionage Act when, among other things, they willfully retain national-defense documents and fail to return them to a proper government official upon request. In November, Biden's personal lawyer discovered the classified documents and returned them to the government without a request. So that statute does not apply. Biden has denied knowing that he had the documents.

”The contrast with Trump is stark. The National Archives and Records Administration first asked him to return missing documents in May 2021. The following January, Archives officials retrieved 15 boxes of government records, and on June 3, 2022, his lawyer signed a sworn statement that all documents responsive to a grand jury subpoena were being returned after a 'diligent' search. ... In August, a federal court was provided evidence that the lawyer's statement was likely false, and the court issued the search warrant that allowed the FBI to seize upwards of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago. They included more than 70 documents marked 'Secret' or 'Top Secret,' some apparently containing information whose disclosure could conceivably endanger the lives of American intelligence sources overseas.

“The apparent obstruction of justice—with evidence pointing to Trump's direct involvement—makes up the serious misconduct here, more serious than a former president simply having removed documents from their proper place. Trump's lawyers repeatedly asserted in court that the Mar-a-Lago documents were 'personal,' effectively admitting that Trump took them and kept them.”

-- “Biden's Classified Documents Should Have No Impact on Trump's Legal Jeopardy,” by Donald Ayer, Mark S. Zaid, and Dennis Aftergut, in The Atlantic. Good reminders all around. I'm already sensing Republicans and even the press desperate to create a false equivalance between these two matters, while some Dems, hand-wringing all the while, seem desperate for expiation. They should just read this article and STFU. All three writers are lawyers. Ayer was deputy solicitor general under Reagan and deputy attorney general under George H. W. Bush; Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor; and Zaid is a national security attorney in D.C. We did a piece on Zaid in my day job a few years back.