Guesses on how angry Trump is that Pence reacted the same way as Biden and not the same way as Trump did?
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came here to say this. I would not be surprised if top top top ranking officials have a random classified folder forgotten in their house somewhere. like you said part of the job and you bring it home with you.
and then there is orangeman…
whoever is in charge of retrieving, transferring and securing the documents needs to get their shit together. They obviously have gaps in how they track and keep the documents.
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The worst part of the Biden and now Pence hits with this is everyone then devalues the Trump scandal, or makes it the “same thing”. It’s not even remotely close. Two of the three identified the items and proactively reached out and said “um, I have this stuff, come take it.” The other was pursued, politely, for nearly two years to return what he had and said he didn’t have it, had returned it, his dog ate it, etc until it had to be forcibly retrieved from an unsecure location next to framed fake magazine copies of himself.
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There are large incinerators.
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I just imagine the dumb crap my company does, but add a twist for default government behavior. Like every email I send from my work account gets one of those non-enforceable “this is confidential” disclaimers. I just have to assume that, for example, the FBI IT systems, just to be safe, add “This is classified” notices to all emails instead. Plan a lunch with co-workers and one of them forwards it on to a significant other? Yep sharing classified documents.
I’m sure there is some farcical comedy to be written about the level of pointless classification done.
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Of course this is just the media’s way of saying “everyone does it!” They’re bothsidering the hell out of classified documents just to exonerate Trumpy.
This is absolutely true, and the Reps and their media allies will make sure that, in the end, Trump’s deliberately taking sixty boxes of documents was no big deal.
The big problem is that so , so many things are classified
Also true. But I think we sometimes delude ourselves by thinking that high government officials live in a constant state of awareness of the importance of their actions.
I’d wager that every president and vice president spends a good deal of their time operating on a mundane level, behaving like every other member of upper management. They take stuff home to read in bed. They’re only partially aware of regulations and figure those pesky things don’t apply to them anyway. They filch stuff from the office. They use their personal phone for a call because it’d be a pain in the ass to go back to the office for the secure one. They’re also likely surrounded by staff who treat them like divas and don’t want to cause trouble by pointing out the boss’ transgressions.
I say this not to excuse the behavior but to suggest that even high-level governance is often done by people bumbling through the day wondering what’s for dinner instead of considering the fallout of their actions.
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I’m beginning to think that on the last day in office, some lackey just pushes everything on a Pres/VP’s desk into banker boxes and sends them off. Time to check out all the living P/VP’s homes.
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None of this surprises me since dealing with any sufficiently large bureaucracy will have just passive leakage. This is just something that you should know how to handle when it does happen, preferably without media being snoops if you’re inclined to not have such info being published.
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There’s just so much stuff that the govt thinks is ‘critical’ information which it ain’t.
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It doesn’t seem like these cases are personal/extemporaneous notes that were never reviewed or marked in the first case - a quick “search” wouldn’t find those unless the searcher was cleared and knowledgeable of the source material on which to make a derivative classification determination. I’ll bet my life that most who’ve worked in the nat’l security-industiral-complex have notes/etc that might be “interesting” if given a thorough wire-brushing.
However it sounds like these are marked documents - and it’s not very hard to immediately see that they’re different than mother’s shopping list. Often they even come with pretty blue, red and orange cover sheets.
What’s clear, from personal observation over the years, is that electees and appointees (+ their transient staff) aren’t indoctrinated in “the right way” and don’t take it seriously. I’ve long ago ceased being shocked by what gets mishandled and even intentionally leaked by the “powers that be”. If I even thought of doing what they do, I’d lose my job and likely need to lawyer-up for an exciting ride…
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I used it to line the rabbits’ litter box… you sure you want them back?
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Cheney’s documents don’t even need to be classified to do incredible damage!
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It is my understanding that, even in those situations, one cannot assign a blanket FOIA exemption without being able to explicitly point out what information meets those requirements, down to the specific exemption category. Now of course nobody “pulls that string”.
In my experience things generated on a classified (separated-ish from the rest of the world) system would be marked “protect at system-high until receiving a formal classification determination”. The attendee list for kiddo’s 9th b-day party would never be on that network in the first place.
But, with 25+yrs in the nuclear weapons business I’ve long understood that Washington DC Is Different and that they are very different animals than we are down in the trenches and off in the weeds.
The attendee list for kiddo’s 9th b-day party would never be on that network in the first place.
Oh, you would think. I knew people who regularly used networks for comms that were decidedly not classification appropriate- even though we were all periodically reminded not to do that. One colleague in particular was a standout because “NIPR was too slow”.
…and then there was the case of porn uploaded to SIPRnet from a “morale” share (really)
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I mean, this government loses nuclear freaking warheads, ffs. Hell, it’s not even clear how many nukes we’ve lost. And that’s the ones we’ve permanently lost as opposed to the numerous times we’ve temporarily lost them.
The classified docs issue is the trump cockup I’m least concerned about (his obstruction and apparent willingness to sell them and or extort people with them is another matter entirely, though).
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There is a nice analogy in a Steve Shive’s video.
Shopper A fills up a cart with goods and walks out the door. The cashier politely points this out to them, and Shopper A keeps walking. Security calls for Shopper A to return to the store, and Shopper A scampers out in to the car park. Security gives chase, and Shopper A ducks and dives among the parked cars, all the while loudly proclaiming their innocence. Shopper A is wrestled to the ground and brought back to the store, shouting that they’ve done nothing wrong. Shopper A is shown CCTV footage of them taking goods from the store and not paying for them. Shopper A says that the videos are fake, and the police are called.
Shopper B buys a basket of goods from the store and walks out. In the car park, Shopper B notices that they haven’t paid for one of their items. Shopper B returns to the store and has Customer Service check the contents of their basket against their till receipt. Shopper B apologizes and leaves the store with everything resolved.
Of course, Shoppers A and B are both white.
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yeah, intentionality is a huge part of the difference with what trump did.
he knowingly took classified documents because they had value. biden and pence accidentally retained documents they shouldn’t have kept.
( also, didn’t trump have boxes of this stuff, rather than the few pages being found elsewhere? )
eta: i think we also know that since trump doesn’t read, and golfs more than he works, he didn’t take the documents as part of the job. did he even have a job as president? it never showed
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It appears as they all really do do it and once the classified document people find out you have some they ask you to show and tell and then they decide where those documents should be.
The guy last never wants to follow laws or even long standing tradition.
Pence’s and Biden’s documents may never have been returned or maybe they would have without fanfare but once they got warrants for what’s his name they had no choice but to show and tell what they had.
So the last guy having the documents may not have been a problem but how he handled the return certainly was.
It would be interesting to know what all these documents actually are. I get the feeling there are tons of documents that get classified just because.
I watch Antiques Road Show all the time, I’ll bet by today’s standards a lot of the presidential documents people have would have been classified.
All of this is a nothing burger but once they did the search warrants (I’m not saying they shouldn’t have) they have no choice other then what’s Pence and Biden are doing.
Unfortunately that gives the right all kinds of talking points.
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