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With all the outstanding questions about who packed up then-Vice President Joe Biden’s files in the
Obama Administration’s final days, who unpacked them and why documents with classified markings were unlawfully removed in the
process, one fact is pretty well-established. Biden’s testy response to a reporter’s question about how such documents ended
up next to his Corvette (“By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. Ok? So it’s not like it’s sitting out in the
street.”) was God-awful. It may not have matched Donald Trump’s document defense (“You’re the president of the United States,
you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it”), but it was bad.
While it remains a stretch to imagine that the departing Vice President personally packed his papers,
there are plenty of legitimate questions. They are questions, of course, to which the Biden White House generally can’t
respond publicly, for reasons that are also legitimate. It knows that the media is demanding answers to what happened when,
who knew it and what the classified documents said, and that not providing them quickly subjects the president to withering
criticism. That’s the way that works.
But White House personnel and Biden’s lawyers aren’t at all in a position even to know what those
answers are, let alone to state them publicly. This is because there are individuals who worked in the Vice President’s
office, or at Biden’s Washington think tank or on his personal staff who have to be questioned — and neither the White House
nor Biden’s own lawyers can interview them. From the outset the Department of Justice (DOJ) and a Special Counsel were
conducting an investigation, and no one could contact these people without risking being perceived as interfering with
it.
And making statements that may later prove incomplete or inaccurate will generate its own political
problems, if not legal ones.
But this is Washington, after all, where being loudly irresponsible trumps being circumspect every
time. It was hilarious to see Congressional Republicans be silent as a graveyard when Trump removed over 300 classified
documents at Mar-a-Lago, stonewalled requests for their return, then disobeyed a grand jury subpoena and then had an
attorney lie about the ongoing concealment of top-secret materials. These same Congressional Republicans then decided
that 20 classified documents found under Biden’s control were a very big deal. When pressed to explain this flagrant
hypocrisy, the cat didn’t only have their tongue. It had their larynx.
In January of 2023, the new Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Ohio Republican and Trump
favorite Jim Jordan, demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland turn over documents that Jordan knew could not be turned
over while the investigation of President Biden’s handling of the classified documents was ongoing. Jordan was the
Republicans’ exemplary choice to head the Judiciary Committee since he isn’t a lawyer and never even took the bar exam.
He calls himself a lawyer “wannabe,” which is just what you want to have running the Judiciary Committee. He did, however,
vote to reject the electoral votes in the 2020 election, and blew off a subpoena issued by another Congressional committee
compelling him to answer questions under oath about the January 6 Capitol breach.
Republican Representative James Comer, the incoming chair of the newly-named Oversight and
Accountability Committee, was understandably stumped when asked why, if he was so “concerned” about the 20 classified
documents found among Biden’s papers, he pronounced the over 300 taken by Trump to Florida “not a priority.” And the
Republican Speaker Kevin (“It’s about transparency!”) McCarthy, who opposed an investigation into Trump’s pilfering of
classified material and obstruction of justice, demanded an investigation into Biden.
So, at the end of January 2023, here’s where we stood: About the Biden document debacle we didn’t
know much. About Congressional Republicans we knew all we needed to.[1]
The revelations about the handling of classified documents involving President Joe Biden - and
previously former President Donald Trump - have raised concerns about the procedures for keeping and tracking such
records.
According to John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security acting undersecretary for
intelligence, some of the legal and other requirements for keeping and tracking classified material is as follows.
According to experts, the White House security office makes arrangements to safely store classified
documents securely at other locations such as residences. When a president or vice president leaves office, the White House
and its staff are obligated to return all government records covered under the Presidential Records Act, which includes all
classified documents. BUT, For the majority of classified documents, there is no enforcement mechanism to ensure
they get returned. It essentially boils down to an honor system. Only the most highly sensitive documents operate under a
check-out, check-in system, and that represents only a small percentage of all classified documents. It thus
appears that RHIP – Rank Has Its Privileges – different security rules apply for us ordinary citizens!
Most of the time, missing or mishandled documents are only discovered in one of two ways: someone
either self-reports or someone discovers them and then reports it. The security system usually doesn’t uncover the
violation.
ABC News reported that some documents found at the Penn Biden Center were marked top secret, but
even top-secret materials would not typically operate under a sign-in, sign-out system. That system would apply only to top
secret documents with an associated compartment -- for example, TS/SCI (top secret/sensitive compartmentalized
information).
In the case of presidential material sent to the National Archives, it relies on the outgoing White
House for a full accounting of the documents the administration is turning over, again, essentially an honor system.
The White House security office in every administration is tasked with properly preparing staff to
preserve their records and ensure that all government documents, notes, etc., including those that may be classified, are
accounted for and returned.
It should be apparent that the honor system is subject to failure, and not everyone complies fully or
is sufficiently careful. Classified materials could be inadvertently packed without the appropriate oversight.
QUESTION: Since when and by whom was it decided that the nation’s security should be left to an honor
system?
In the case of Donald Trump, the National Archives realized that especially sensitive records from
his administration were missing, such as Trump's letter to North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un.
Also, it was only after 15 boxes were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago that the National Archives
discovered they included documents with classification markings. The Archives also became aware of additional missing
government papers through congressional investigations. For example, the House Jan. 6 committee made several requests of
the Archives for specific documents and when the Archives went to search for them, some were not there.
With both Biden and Trump, records with classification markings were not properly handled or secured
and were discovered after both left office.[2]
Clearly, much of the fire and brimstone over Trump and Biden’s handling – or mishandling - of
classified material has been nothing but political posturing. BUT - and to me that’s a most significant but -
there is a much more real and important issue. That issue is national security and the handling of classified
material!
For all of my professional career as an engineer, and even before that, as an engineering student
and part-time employee at MIT, I held national security clearances that ranged from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET and above.
Handling classified material was an every-day matter in my work. I never took security to be routine. Classified
documents were always signed for and scrupulously accounted for. Classified documents were always locked in
an appropriate safe at work when not in use. On top of all that, periodic accounting was performed to verify that the
classified material was where it was supposed to be.
So here some 20+ plus years after I retired from work that was intimately involved with national
security issues, I am at a total loss to understand how two United States presidents and their professional advisors could
so callously mishandle classified documents and how they could then treat their security violations as irrelevant and
unimportant. I also cannot understand how these security violations could go on for so without being detected by a security
system and by security personnel that were supposed to be monitoring where and how the documents in question were being
stored and handled. Who was guarding the hen house? I cannot perceive of such gross incompetence in matters of national
security having existed when I possessed my security clearances. The thought of taking home classified material and leaving
it unsecured in my garage or in my house would never have entered my mind. Such action would have been a security violation
for which I could have been prosecuted.
The investigations into the presidential mishandling of classified documents need to be elevated
above politics. They are national security concerns and should be addressed in that light. The system is obviously broken.
It needs to be repaired so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated in the future.
National security should never be performed on an "honor system" basis. It should never be one set
of rules for the ordinary citizen and a different set of rules for someone "important", even if that "important" person is
the president or vice president of the United States. The persons responsible for overseeing our national security should
never be allowed to "look the other way" or "close their eyes" to security violations - even if the violations are committed
by the highest elected officials in this nation.
When I possessed my security clearance, there were very serious consequences for security violations,
including: reprimand, loss of one's clearance (sometimes resulting in loss of one's job), and criminal prosecution
(with potentially severe penalties). Deliberate flouting of the national security laws of this country were then regarded
quite seriously. Nothing should have changed between then and now! It’s time to bring those responsible for violating
the national security rules and laws of this nation to account and to ensure that such breaches of security will not be
repeated in the future!
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References:
- Biden’s blunders fire up GOP lawmakers, Jeff Robbins, Boston Herald: Pge 19,
17 January 2023.
- Questions answered about tracking classified documents, Gabe Ferris, Katherine Faulders, Justin Fishel
and Luke Barr, Yahoo.com, 13 January 2023.
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