Let’s be honest: as much as they might obsess the media, the classified documents scandals that engulfed Donald Trump and now President Joe Biden are a bit overblown. Rampant overclassification and absurd levels of government secrecy have been a problem in Washington for decades, often being used to ruin people’s lives in nightmarish, Kafkaesque ways. Of all the pressing crises afflicting the United States right now, presidents mishandling classified documents isn’t just not a top priority — it wouldn’t even rank in the top ten.

But all of that’s not to say that the story doesn’t matter at all, as so many commentators who eagerly pounced on Trump’s document scandal are now trying to claim. The true outrage about this whole affair is that if Biden and Trump weren’t wealthy, prominent, and politically powerful people, we wouldn’t be having any of this discussion at all — they’d simply be prosecuted and thrown in jail without anyone so much as batting an eye.

The fact is, low-level violators of classification law who have mishandled secrets in exactly the careless and sometimes accidental ways that Trump and Biden, respectively, did are never let off the hook, nor given the kind of understanding, empathy, and excuse-making both of those presidents have benefited from.