“The View” co-hosts on Friday compared the classified documents discovered at President Joe Biden’s think tank and Delaware home to the stash of classified material found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August.
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate the possible mishandling of the classified documents found in the Biden Penn Center and inside his garage in Wilmington, Delaware. The co-hosts said that the documents are a bad look for the president.
“He knew of the second tranche that was found in his garage on Dec. 20, but we only know now because the press was going to report it and they came forward,” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said. “I would encourage the height of transparency here going forward. If you know of anything more, tell the public now because when we talk about classified documents, we’re talking about national security secrets. These involve Ukraine, Iran. That means it could put the lives of assets in the field — American troops, American intel officers — at risk if in the wrong hands.”
“It’s a very big deal and the final thing I’ll say is, I don’t think we should hold ourselves to the standard of, ‘Yeah, but Donald Trump did it, so it’s okay.’ That’s the lowest possible bar imaginable, and we can’t excuse what Biden did just because Trump did it,” Griffin concluded.
Co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro came to Biden’s defense, arguing that the president’s lawyers did the right thing by transferring the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. Hostin said that Biden’s handling of classified documents to Trump’s is like comparing “apples to orangutans.”
“It’s like comparing apples to orangutans to say, ‘Ten documents were found; we decided that we would cooperate, but 300 or more documents were found in a golden toilet,'” Hostin said. (RELATED: ‘Republicans Are Behind It’: Sunny Hostin Asks If GOP Planted Classified Docs In Biden’s Garage)
Hostin’s “golden toilet” reference alluded to photographs that appeared to indicate that Trump had flushed unspecified documents down the White House toilet, CNN previously reported. The former president has repeatedly denied these allegations.
“But I think it still looks bad for Biden,” co-host Joy Behar replied.
Navarro then quipped that Biden could have imitated Trump by flushing the documents down a toilet or feeding them to his dog, Commander.
“Neither of them should have had classified documents. Period. Done,” Navarro said. She then argued that the two cases were not identical because the “National Archives tried for over a year to get the documents from Trump.”
“When Trump finally handed over 15 boxes — quince cajas, people — they discovered classified documents … it was referred to the grand jury, they issued a subpoena, the investigators visited Mar-a-Lago. The lawyers lied to investigators and said there were no more documents. That was a lie. That was false, and that’s when a search warrant was executed,” Navarro added.
Biden said he was “surprised” that classified documents were found to be in his private possession and that he is unaware of the content of the documents. After the FBI seized Mar-a-Lago in August, Trump said the documents had all been declassified and were in “secured storage.”
FBI agents said they found 11 sets of classified documents — four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents and three more of confidential documents — at Mar-a-Lago. A highly redacted affidavit released by the DOJ on Aug. 26 revealed that 14 out of the 15 boxes retrieved by the National Archives and Records Administration in January consisted of 184 documents — 25 of the documents had “top secret” markings, 92 were labeled “secret” and 67 had a “confidential” warning.