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Roger that! The TS SCI stayed in the SCIF.
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I doubt that it’s the only critical distinction he doesn’t even recognize he doesn’t recognize; but his behavior suggests a profound failure to comprehend why they call it an ‘administration’.
Administrators often have a great deal of power(both because they outright get handed the keys to the dangerous machinery so they can administer it; and because if an issue is boring and esoteric enough odds aren’t bad that there’s simply nobody who cares enough to hunt down and contradict the initial decision on the matter so long as it doesn’t cascade into a real mess); but their power is inherently conditional: granted to them so that they might exercise someone else’s apparatus toward either that someone else’s goals or within the bounds of certain understood norms. It’s not to say that administrators never self-deal or abuse their power; but the important thing is that ‘self-dealing’ and ‘abuse of power’ are meaningful charges precisely because administrative power is conditionally granted, not a gift or a prerogative.
It’s no great surprise that someone who barely seems to recognize entities outside himself, except either as enemies or prey, would be completely blind to the difference between a conditional grant of power and simply mainlining sovereignty, where the power in one’s possession may be exercised wholly without reference to objectives outside oneself; but he sure does.
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Why not both? After all, he’s not going to bother using his limited cognitive abilities to bother understanding anything he doesn’t care about.
It’s not like Trump knows how to run anything “like a businesss,” or at least a publicly traded one either. Although he is certainly as grifty as modern CEOs the idea of answering to either stockholders or even a tame board of directors is beyond him.
To the extant that what was stolen was more detailed than Trump’s specially dumbed down for him daily brief, there are definitely other hands at work here.
I’m guessing the scene went something like this.
Trump starts to walk out of his briefing with a highly classified document that he doesn’t really understand, but his lizard brain realizes must be important because other people seem very concerned with it.
Shocked staffer:" You can’t take that out of the room, its SCI!"
“I’m president, I can do what I want!”
But classified material stays in the SCIF!"
Trump dimly remembers something about classification authority from some briefing.
“I’m president, if I’m carrying it out its declassified, so there!”
The thing is, even if that passed muster in a court, (and it might well) declassifying it doesn’t make it his personal property. Reportedly one of the documents that the archives wanted back was the Hurricane map that he Sharpeid to change the path of a hurricane to conform to his earlier statement. Even though he never admits that he made any mistakes, he recalls being laughed at for that stupidity and would want to keep it out of the hands of others. As if everybody didn’t see that on TV.
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Why does my brain tell me there was some headline or paragraph from some “insider scoop” sellout book about Trump staff photocopying iPads from years ago…
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Um… yeah, actually. Documents produced by the executive branch (or any branch of government) are indeed property of the American government, and hence, property of the American people. Any of us can head to a NARA branch and do research on documents as long as they are not classified in some way… and of course, after a set amount of time, documents end up declassified and accessible. People WILL be able to access these documents in the future and it’s our tax dollars that pay to have these documents processed and placed into our archives.
Hm. That seems problematic. I’m personally not convinced that going digital with documents is a great idea.
Wait… are you really blaming the archivists here? I’m fairly sure they DO know what is missing, which is how the FBI can know what they were looking for in the raid…
And THIS is absolutely why he needs to face consequences for his actions here. Not just for him, but to send a message to all the wanna-bes who look up to him, and believe that how he acts is good and just.
It would explain why Kushner was seemingly pushing away from Trump after Jan. 6th…
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Of course it’s a bit more complicated than this. Declassified ≠ approved for public release. Indeed “defense technical information” is never approved for public release until it has been specifrically reviewed and approved for public release. Indeed, finding somebody with the proper expertise to review old material for long ended programs can be quite difficult.
I’m quite certain that given his disregard for records handling, they know EXACTLY what classified material was missing. I’m rather sure that the people responsible kept exact track of every document that was shown to him, if for no other reason to make sure that they weren’t personally blamed if any of them came up missing. Some of it might have been destroyed (albeit not by an approved destruction device, toilets, tearing them up, etc. are NOT on the NSA list.) but they know what was missing.
Even though I suspect that Trump will never be punished for this, at least the documents seized are back in secure hands.
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Seems problematic to me too. I’m fairly certain they have hard copies of everything, and likely multiples. It would seem to be necessary for disaster recovery purposes if nothing else.
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The hard copies can be stored in archives and taken out if needed. There was already a working digital system for distributing classified documents, so (the argument goes) the only reason for the Trump Administration to want them on paper was to copy them and give them to people not allowed to have them.
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I’m a historian, not an archivist, but I suspect that the digitization of information is a hotly discussed topic in those circles. And I’m interested in how the efforts of folks like Brewster Kahle intersect with trained archivists with regards to preservation. The Internet Archive is of course attempting to preserve the internet, so stuff that was created digitally and not as a document (and it intersects nicely with Prelinger, which has preserved lots of film, etc, produced by the government). But it does include lots of scanned documents, too.
Which, of course, we’re talking about archival materials. NARA is the repository for all documentation created by our government, however it is created.
Except we don’t know that. There are plenty of reasons for putting stuff on paper that aren’t “people who are unable to work a computer.” We’ve been using some sort of physical copies of documents for literally all of human history. There really is no reason to throw out that technology just because a new shiny emerged that has proven to be less reliable in terms of sticking around…
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In addition, that’s evidence of a crime (altering a NOAA hurricane map is illegal).
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