After the Justice Department released a staged photo of classified documents – including some marked “Top Secret/SCI” (sensitive compartmented information) — which the FBI had spread on the floor of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, President Biden was asked on “60 Minutes” what he thought when he saw that picture. He said he wondered “how that could possibly happen — how anyone could be that irresponsible.”

Well, the Justice Department has not yet released a similar photo of the classified documents found in a locked closet at Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. But CNN reports that some of the Biden documents, like Trump’s, were top secret and “bore the marking ‘sensitive compartmented information'” — indicating the information was derived from our most sensitive intelligence sources. The documents reportedly included “US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.” How could anyone be that irresponsible?

The classified documents — which reportedly were found in a manila folder labeled “personal” – were not just kept at the Penn Biden Center’s D.C. office. That office opened on Feb. 8, 2018 — more than a year after Biden left office.

So, where were they kept before then?

Who had custody of them and under what conditions were they held?

When it was discovered that Trump had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, critics said his holding them at his private club threatened national security. Requesting the director of national intelligence to conduct a damage assessment, then-House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote, “It is hard to overstate the national security danger that could emanate from the reckless decision to remove and retain this material.” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) warned that Trump’s actions had endangered our troops. The New York Times even published a 3D interactive model to show how “easily accessible classified documents may have been to the thousands of guests” who “may have been within feet of the materials.”

Well, what about the Penn Biden Center?

It hosts classes for college students at its D.C. office and has participated in a joint program funded by the Japanese government.

Did any of these classes include foreign nationals?

Moreover, the center served as a way-station for Biden aides, including Antony Blinken and Steve Ricchetti. Did they host anyone who might have connections with foreign governments and thus may have been “within feet of the materials”? Maybe the Times will now give us a 3D model of the Penn Biden Center, too.

Let’s be clear: None of this absolves Trump, who had hundreds of classified documents in his unlawful possession, including documents marked “HCS” — a control system designed to protect intelligence information derived from clandestine human sources. This is extremely serious. And unlike Biden, whose lawyers immediately turned over the documents to the National Archives, Trump had to be forced to relinquish those in his possession.

Mishandling of classified documents is a serious violation of federal law. It does not matter whether it is fewer than a dozen, as in the Biden case, or hundreds, or whether their removal and retention was intentional. The Espionage Act states that anyone who “through gross negligence permits [classified information] to be removed from its proper place of custody . . . Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

The revelation that Biden appears to have violated this law complicates any Justice Department effort to prosecute Trump for the same offense. We have long known that Hillary Clinton kept highly classified information on her private server, including seven email chains that included intelligence classified at the top-secret/Special Access Program level — and that foreign actors obtained access to some of her emails. Now it appears that Biden also removed sensitive intelligence and kept it in an unsecured closet in his private office as well as in other still-to-be-determined conditions.

Prosecuting Trump, but not Clinton or Biden, for mishandling classified documents would be extremely difficult to explain to the American people. It is already suspicious that the documents in Biden’s private office were discovered on Nov. 2 –less than a week before the midterm elections — yet the public was not informed of the discovery until this week. The FBI search of Trump’s home, less than three months earlier, had led Democrats to argue that Trump and his supporters were too irresponsible to be trusted with the levers of power.

Why weren’t the American people told that Biden had similarly mishandled classified information before they went to the polls?

Add to that the recent revelations of attempts by the FBI, the intelligence community and social media platforms to censor and discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation, and millions of Americans will conclude that a Trump prosecution would be just the latest weaponization of federal law enforcement against conservatives.

— Marc Thiessen is a conservative author, political appointee, and weekly columnist for The Washington Post.