Raskin: Biden classified materials negligence ‘ocean away’ from Trump’s ‘deliberate’ conduct

Rep. Jaime Raskin (D-Md.) said President Biden’s handling of classified materials is an “ocean away” from former President Trump’s, which he called “deliberate.” 

During his appearance on CNN on Thursday, shortly after the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s 388-page report, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Accountability Committee was asked to share his thoughts on the findings. 

Raskin initially said he would love to come up with a solution to prevent other government officials from taking classified documents after they are done serving in office. 

“You know, as the lead Democrat in the Oversight Committee, we would like to do some legislation to get our best archivists and librarians together to figure out a way that we can tag material more quickly and prevent it from kind of negligent mishandling, the kind we had from Mike Pence and Joe Biden,” Raskin said. 

The Maryland Democrat then emphasized that the findings in Hur’s Thursday report, which detailed Biden struggling to remember things when speaking to his ghostwriter and investigators, are still an “ocean away” from Trump’s handling of classified documents over which he was indicted.

“But that is an ocean away from Donald Trump, who deliberately pilfered hundreds of top secret classified government documents and then refused to return them and hid them all over his house,” Raskin said. “Whereas this Republican special counsel said that Joe Biden had been completely forthcoming and cooperative and they’re not bringing any criminal charges against him.” 

Hur’s report concluded no charges should be brought against the president, but some findings in it referred to Biden’s struggling to remember things. 

Rasking addressed some of those findings, accusing Hur of taking “cheap shots” against Biden while adding the same criticism could be applied to Trump, his likely general election rival. 

“He did take some gratuitous slaps at Joe Biden because of his age, and a lot of these kind of age, discriminatory and age insulting remarks are getting rather tiresome,” Raskin continued. “All we really need from a special prosecutor like Hur is a decision whether there’s any legal grounds to move forward. He said there’s not and he didn’t need to take all those cheap shots. And obviously, you could take the same kinds of cheap shots [at] Donald Trump.”