Donald Trump's claim about Biden's '1,850 boxes' is inaccurate

"What about the 1,850 Boxes that Biden is fighting to keep secret," Trump said on Truth Social, shortly before pleading not guilty to 37 charges during a June 13, 2023 court appearance in Miami, Florida.

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Screenshot from Truth Social taken June 13, 2023

Trump has lobbed similar accusations before, referencing "1,850 boxes" on Truth Social after learning of his indictment on June 8, and again during a campaign rally in Georgia two days later.

"He won't give back the 1,850 boxes, and you're going to find some real gems in there," Trump said during a May 10 CNN town hall, one of several times he mentioned the boxes during the event.

Online, supporters of the former president have echoed his claims.

"Joe Biden was withholding 1,850 boxes of classified document from when he served as VP with no declassification authority," conservative podcast host Benny Johnson wrote in a June 9 Facebook post that received nearly 16,000 interactions on the platform.

Separately, a special counsel is probing Biden's conduct after the White House disclosed in January that the president's personal lawyers had found a "small number of documents" marked as classified in a locked closet in an office. The documents, from Biden's tenure as Barack Obama's vice president, were turned over to authorities along with other documents discovered in a garage at the president's Delaware home.

But the 1,850 boxes called into question in Trump's speeches, and in the online posts, relate to an earlier part of Biden's political career -- and are not what Trump and others have made them out to be.

The papers are from Biden's long tenure as a Senator representing Delaware, not his two terms as vice president, according to the University of Delaware's website (archived here).

"The Biden boxes at the University of Delaware are his Senate papers," the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which assumes custody of presidential records under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, told AFP in a June 13 statement. "The office files of Senators (and House Representatives) are their personal property."

Biden's donated documents

The president donated his Senate files to the university -- his alma mater -- more than a decade ago, with access to them set to remain limited to him and others to whom he grants access until no sooner than two years after his retirement from public life.

Reached by AFP, a spokesman for the school pointed to its webpage describing the donation, which says the papers arrived in June 2012.

The White House declined to comment and referred AFP's questions to the Justice Department, citing the ongoing investigation. AFP contacted the department, but no response was forthcoming.

Unlike presidential records, which are considered government property under the law and must be turned over to NARA with the end of each leader's time in the White House, documents from a senator's time in office are their personal property. The chamber's website (archived here) confirms this ownership and says most senators donate theirs to a research repository in their home state.

A list maintained by NARA (archived here) tracks where many members of Congress have stored their records.

"Senators' papers are by tradition considered the property of the individual senator, and it is common for former senators to donate their papers to a library or archive," said Margaret Kwoka, a professor of law at the Ohio State University and expert on information law.

Experts said there is no evidence Biden is keeping his Senate collection from authorities in violation of any law, as Trump claims.

US media including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and ABC News (archived here, here, here and here) reported that the FBI searched Biden's archives at the university twice in February 2023, with the consent and cooperation of the president's legal team. The reports said the materials did not appear to contain classified markings -- although they were still being analyzed at the time.

"I also have not seen any reason to believe that they contain, much less consist entirely of, classified records," Kwoka told AFP.

The indictment against Trump, meanwhile, alleges that he took hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, kept them unsecured and worked with an aide to conceal some from the FBI and his own attorney. It also accuses the former president of showing classified documents about US military operations and plans to people not authorized to see them.

"The storage of those records is simply not comparable to the treatment of classified materials alleged in the indictment against former President Trump," Kwoka said.

Benjamin Hufbauer, an associate professor at the University of Louisville and an expert on presidential libraries, agreed.

"Biden's Senate records to do not have anything like the kind of top-secret and very sensitive military materials that former President Trump was storing at Mar-a-Lago, and was sometimes apparently showing to his guests."

AFP has debunked other false claims from Trump related to his retention of classified documents.