At this point, the secret documents scandal leads me to two observations.
1. This has been said ad nauseum but bears repeating because information dies if it isn't. What Biden and Pence did is in no way comparable to what Trump did. Both Biden and Pence appear to have mistakenly packed some classified documents at the end of their time in office. In both cases, it was their people who found the documents, and their lawyers who immediately contacted the National Archives and the Department of Justice to return them. Both are cooperating with the investigations.
I could believe that Trump deliberately took them (he has a fetish for souvenirs) or that he was waiting for the election to be overthrown until the last possible moment and they just got swept up in the rush of mad packing when he left. I lean a bit toward deliberate simply because in the Trump hotel bar in New York, there is an empty folder marked secret and a document marked confidential publicly displayed along with a ton of other keepsakes.
But that doesn't really matter. What matters is what happened afterward, and which strongly supports the idea that he did it deliberately. In contrast to Biden and Pence, who immediately returned the material on their discovery, Trump first lied about having any secret documents at all, then handed a few back and lied about there not being any more, then had one of his attorneys sign a document attesting to the truth of the lie, then was caught on security camera footage moving boxes of documents to other storage rooms to hide them from the FBI, and after months of this back and forth was raided by the FBI who even found top secret documents in an unlocked desk drawer amongst the detritus of what passes for Trump's life, then sued for the return of those documents claiming both executive privilege and personal ownership (which claims are contradictory) as well as that they were no longer secret because he declassified them with his mind.
I guess you put your fingers to your temples and hum and declassification happens. It's like Karnak the Magnificent.
Regardless of how the documents came into his possession, Trump deliberately and relentlessly obstructed their return. Biden and Pence did not.
2. But it also points up a much larger problem. The classification of documents in the US is a shambolic mess. There are almost 1500 officials across 16 agencies that have the power to stamp things classified. There is no coordination or overarching policy or management at all. It is possible (and has happened) for one department to deem a document of historic value only and declassify it while another treats the same document as extraordinarily dangerous for people to see and retains its classification as top secret. Classified and declassified at the same time.
As Fred Kaplan points out, there is a serious problem with overclassification. There are three basic classification levels, confidential, secret and top secret. Anyone (like Kaplan) who has had access to these materials will tell you that confidential documents are so innocuous that the National Archives has recommended abolishing the category altogether.
Documents are often marked classified to draw attention to them, under the impression that higher ups are more likely to read them if they are. Documents are classified in bulk, as part of a particular category, with no one ever looking at them to see if they merit that classification. CIA drone strikes in countries that we are not at war with are all top secret, even though everyone knows about them (it is hard to miss the explosion of a Hellfire missile, which can level an entire city block) and several NGOs track them. A secret that everybody knows about is not a secret.
And on top of all of that, no one anywhere is responsible for coordinating classification or for maintaining a database of what has been classified, at what level, when and where it went out and when or if it has come back. Every one of those 1500 people is their own private island. That lack of oversight is directly responsible for the Biden and Pence affairs.
And that situation is ludicrously dangerous. It is something that Biden should address immediately as a clear and present danger to national security. There should be a single office through which all classification flows, in which every classified document is recorded, and when that document is provided to a government official who that person was and when it was provided and when it was returned. Whenever any official leaves office, that department should be required to run an audit to determine if there are any unreturned materials, require them to be returned, and if they cannot be found, launch an investigation at that time, not years later when they randomly turn up in a garage or a country club.
If we are going to maintain a classification regime, we need to take it seriously and not haphazardly as we currently do.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/biden-classified-documents-overclassification-merrick-garland.html?fbclid=IwAR23w6VcyIARI4w7ld5PWDnOVIIjTY4SSg-qebFuKnoaZ-D1BQqs_afOpJY
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