These cases are not the same
If anyone things that Trump is being treated less fairly than Pence and Biden they need to realize that Trump is not being prosecuted for any of the highly sensitive documents he gave back to the government, first on his own and then in response to the subpeona. He is only being charged for the documents they found later when they issued a warrant.
Biden and Pence have given back all the documents, no subpoena and no warrant necessary. If they were indicted for retaining those documents they would be being held to a higher standard than Trump.
Read this piece by Eric Levitz which shows that the DOJ has actually given Trump an easier time than anyone else who did what he did. He runs down all the reasons the Clinton, Biden and Pence cases and makes the same point I made above. He then cites a particular case of an average citizen:
[I]t is helpful to contrast the DOJ’s treatment of Trump with its handling of Asia Janay Lavarello, a former civilian employee of the Defense Department.
In 2020, Lavarello was on assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, where she had been researching a classified thesis. Her work drew on other scholarly research that was also classified. She had been conducting the research in a secure information facility at the embassy until COVID-19 shut it down. Shortly thereafter, she brought three classified theses back to her hotel room. That night, she held a dinner party at which a guest discovered the classified documents and confronted her about them. She returned the documents to a safe at the embassy two days later but failed to return them to the secure information facility specifically. For this, the DOJ charged Lavarello with unauthorized retention of classified documents and sought to put her in prison. Ultimately, they reached a plea bargain that put her behind bars for three months.
Compare this to the conduct for which the DOJ did not charge Trump: Upon leaving office, the ex-president brought more than 300 highly classified documents to his private residences, including top-secret materials detailing atomic secrets and national security vulnerabilities; he retained these documents for about a year despite government requests for him to return them. His own public statements indicate that his retention of those documents was willful, and he repeatedly expressed a sense of entitlement to their possession, saying that, as president, he had the power to declassify those materials “even by thinking about it.”
Nevertheless, as late as January 2022, the Justice Department was still giving Trump the opportunity to avoid charges by returning the documents he had taken. The indictment released last week makes this point clear.
In January of last year, Trump returned 197 classified documents to the federal government. Despite his willfully retaining those documents for months, the federal indictment released last week does not charge Trump in connection with any of them — which is to say, the DOJ gave Trump a pass on 197 potential counts of willful retention of national defense information. Instead, it charged him with only 31 counts, each corresponding with a highly classified document that Trump knowingly withheld from the government in January 2022 and the FBI later obtained.
To review: Lavarello removed three classified dissertations from a secure information facility amid a pandemic that prevented her from accessing that facility. She kept the documents in her hotel room and did not deliberately show them to anyone. She then voluntarily returned them to a locked safe at the embassy within a matter of days. The DOJ chose to charge her and seek a prison sentence.
Trump, meanwhile, removed 197 highly classified defense documents from the White House. There is reason to believe he might have shared some of those documents with private citizens since he has been caught on tape sharing other highly classified documents in his possession with friends. He refused initial requests to return the documents, and he retained them for about a year. The DOJ chose not to prosecute him for doing so since he did eventually return them.
There is no substantive reason why Lavarello’s removal of three classified dissertations from an embassy for a few days deserves to be punished more harshly than Trump’s retention of 197 highly classified documents for months. It is clear, therefore, that the Justice Department prosecuted the ex-president much less aggressively than it would an ordinary citizen under the same circumstances. To the extent that political considerations influenced the DOJ’s handling of the case, they led the department to extend Trump extraordinary opportunities to extricate himself from legal peril so as to avoid the politically inflammatory spectacle of his prosecution.