As did Donald Trump. Technically, all government documents are the property of the government. When you leave a job, your work stuff should stay at work - only your personal effects should stay with you.

Presidents are classifying/declassifying authorities. For those documents, the sole determinant value is whether or not their contents are classified or otherwise secret information.

Put it this way. You go to a company dinner and you take the menu home with you. Technically that menu is company property but since it contains precisely zero useful information absolutely no one is going to take exception to it.

Therefore, at heart here is did Trump declassify the documents on his way out the door? If he did, then their value drops to zero and all you have is a beef between himself and the National Archives. This is Boater's point, with the following question to be settled in the courts:

What action does a President need to take to declassify a document?

Note that there is *no* action that Senator Joe Biden or Vice President Joe Biden could take or could have taken: at no point in the entire 40 year affair was he in the right.

There's no indication that Biden let his ghostwriter see any classified documents Yes he did. They could have prosecuted him for this alone.

From the SC's report: justice.gov - Report from special counsel robert k hur february

Also, during his eight years as vice president, Mr. Eiden regularly wrote notes
by hand in notebooks. Some of these notes related to classified subjects, including the
President's Daily Brief and National Security Council meetings, and some of the
notes are themselves classified. After the vice presidency, Mr. Eiden kept these
2
classified notebooks in unsecured and unauthorized spaces at his Virginia and
Delaware homes and used some of the notebooks as reference material for his second
memoir, Promise Me, Dad, which was published in 2017. To our knowledge, no one
has identified any classified information published in Promise Me, Dad, but Mr.
Biden shared information, including some classified information, from those
notebooks with his ghostwriter.