Are you flipping kidding me?
I’m still trying to wrap my head round more classified documents being found where they ought not to be and in the possession of people who clearly should have known better!
Apparently these documents were found in an office used by President Biden prior to his election when he was a member of a Washington think tank (now that’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one and having grown up as an Army brat, I can assure you I’ve heard the term “military intelligence” and found it equally laughable).
I’m sure it will come as a shock to precisely *NO ONE* that the House Republicans have seized on this opportunity to blast President Biden for appalling hypocrisy for excoriating President Trump’s handling of the haul of classified information that was found and seized from Mar-a-Lago.
And I understand the President’s allies pointing out that the much smaller group of documents were discovered whilst cleaning out a old office and once the documents were discovered, the National Archives was contacted and they’ve been fully cooperating with the ensuing NARA review as mitigating circumstances.
I’m of the opinion that whilst one can argue about the degree of negligence and culpability and subsequent cooperation (or lack thereof) with the National Archives, the plain fact remains that classified information was improperly handled and stored and could have potentially been compromised to parties that do not have the clearance to see that information.
That’s the sort of thing that can get valuable intelligence sources killed (or neutralised in spook-speak) and be very damaging to our national security and diplomatic posture.
For me, this is not a question of partisan affiliation.
Both President Biden and President Trump were exceptionally careless in the handling of classified information and I know for darned sure that they were fully briefed on all of the rules governing the accessing, storage, and dissemination of classified information.
Both of them should have known better!
I can remember the abbreviated version of the briefing on handling classified information that I received from my father over 40 years ago (and that I’m sure hasn’t materially changed all that much except in terms of new technologies!) when I happened to ask him why there was a safe being installed in his office in our quarters at Fort Sam Houston and about that padlocked briefcase he’d occasionally have with him that never left his side when it came to visit.
As I was often pressed into service as his company clerk to type reports and other memorandums for him, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that I’d be in close proximity to documents I didn’t have clearance to see.
The cardinal rule was that if that I saw anything laying about with a classification cover sheet, I was to immediately vacate the office and secure the lock and then let him know so he could take the appropriate steps to secure the documents and initiate a security review.
Even if it didn’t have a cover sheet…if it wasn’t in the pile of papers I needed to type his memos, I didn’t need to go snooping through it.
He didn’t need to quote the National Security Act of 1947 nor any of the associated follow-on legislation and regulations governing classified information and the penalties proscribed in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) that could be imposed on both of us should classified material be mishandled. But he did anyway and I can assure you those penalties are rather on the stiff side.
I had thoroughly enjoyed his tour of duty at Ft Leavenworth the previous year when he was doing Command and General Staff College but I had absolutely no desire for us to do another tour there inside the Disciplinary Barracks.
I didn’t have to ever worry about it…whatever classified information he may have had with him was never left out in plain sight nor was I ever in that office when he’d be handling it as there was a sign forbidding entry and he’d lock the door from the inside.
As you might imagine, I had no desire to provoke more of my father’s temper than being his child already did by merely being his child which did wonders for tempering any ideas of excessive curiosity on my part. 🙂
And even knowing some of his MOS classifications in his jacket, it never occurred to me to enquire about classified documents or operations just as I never imagined he’d ever discuss anything that he knew that was classified.
It just wasn’t done.
So is it too much for me to expect that people whose pay grade is orders of magnitude greater than mine would ever be to take information security as seriously as I did when I was nine years old?!?
My father may not have been Navy but I believed then (and I still do!) that “loose lips sink ships!”
Somehow I suspect this won’t be the end of it. I’d be surprised if the National Archives as well as every classifying authority isn’t scrambling behind the scenes to ascertain where all of their classified information is and who has seen it before some reporter stumbles on yet another breach that should never have happened in the first place.
There’s a reason why some of the most sensitive jobs in the government have the title “Secretary”.
Key to being a secretary is being someone who knows how to actually keep secrets!
