‘Not As Bad As Trump’ Is A Lousy Excuse

36 thoughts on “‘Not As Bad As Trump’ Is A Lousy Excuse”

1. I presume you missed the part where the DoJ appointed a special Counsel to investigate this? And the part where it’s been reported on by every MSM outlet?Report

   1. I assume you didn’t read it all? I wrote, “The special counsel should make available its findings to House and Senate committees that investigate the issue.”

      So, no, I didn’t miss it.

      Also, please take your Strawman Destruction Tour elsewhere. I never said the press didn’t report it.Report

      1. The rule of law, and the integrity of the press, demands a full investigation. Brushing it aside using the Trump benchmark is unacceptable.

         If you are going to write that this demands a full investigation and not being brushed aside when it’s receiving a full investigation and not being brushed aside, what reaction do you expect?Report

2. From what I hear, Biden’s documents, or at least some of them, relate to the Obama presidency, so he’s had them for quite a long time. While Trump may have had the right to hold some of his documents, Biden is probably not authorized to hold Obama era classified documents with out returning them then taking them back out. But I’m more interested in how these missing documents were not noticed as being “missing” by ANYONE and inquires made. Maybe that info itself is classified. 🙂Report

   1. There’s certainly a larger question about the classification process. If stuff is really that sensitive shouldn’t it be guarded in such a way as to more reliably prevent this from happening? But if it’s continually being allowed to happen, how sensitive is it to begin with?

      I recall years ago when Wikileaks did the big release of diplomatic cables that many of them were better characterized as instances of officials speaking honestly, rather than information that could create a threat to national security.Report

      1. My only experience with classified documents, other than military guys being very vague about some stories they were telling, is at work. We had a SCIF (sp) where classified documents were held-basically a vault. You had to check in and check out specific documents, log them in and out, etc., and it was your ass if you lost them, misplaced them, etc. We had a security office who made sure any documents checked out were still NEEDED for work periodically, etc. Where’s the gov’ts guy doing this?Report

         1. Where’s the gov’ts guy doing this?

            Apparently out to lunch.Report

            1. More like his boss saying “you DON’T ask these questions of “important” people”.Report

         2. Security is a genuine, worldwide problem exacerbated by computers, but not limited to them. Government doesn’t and shouldn’t have one guy on this; everyone is responsible to the extent that they have access or even spot something wrong. This can’t be a partisan issue. Security is the kind of thing that everyone violates a little when they deem it reasonable (we’ve all likely done that with sloppy password handling). And it’s one of those things you have to clamp down on every once in a while. Every organization has to say “today we will do nothing except this”. It’s impossible to tell if the few presidential cases indicate a systemic problem, but I hope it spurs on a top-to-bottom review of all security in the executive branch.Report

            1. Well, it’s really apples and oranges. The number of classified documents industry has access to is a lot less than what the federal gov’t have. Off the top of my head, a lot of state dept convs etc are probably classified or in some form restricted. Business have no such similar scope. And, business are contractors and are subject to rules laid out by gov’t and the gov’t is PAYING for all that security by contractors since it’s the govts data.Report

               1. I was thinking about security more broadly, not just classified files. I’m thinking about my experience with security in general, and people have a lot of bad habits. I doubt they exist only in the private sector.Report

                  1. Any policy or process that depends on no one ever committing a human error is fatally flawed.Report

                  2. Which leads us back to the dirty pictures sent to the high school kids. At some point, the last precaution has to be saying “this was a perfectly understandable mistake, and it only happened once, and you’re fired”.Report

                  3. Agreed.Report

      2. I recall years ago when Wikileaks did the big release of diplomatic cables that many of them were better characterized as instances of officials speaking honestly, rather than information that could create a threat to national security.

         As Yes Minister put it, The Official Secrets Act doesn’t exist to protect secrets, it exists to protect officials.

         In fairness, keeping honest communications from the public can serve a purpose. There is strong pressure to avid saying things that makes the government look bad, which means if you can’t say those things in private, you won’t say them at all. And if your officials can’t question official narratives, then you might (for example) think you can easily defeat a nearby country and get your military stuck in an disastrous invasion.

         On the other hand, the public needs to know what a government is up to to hold them democratically accountable, so there is a real tension there.Report

         1. Oh absolutely, you certainly want your officials to feel as though they can provide blunt, off the record assessments, and that ability also at times needs to be balanced against the public’s right to know things in a democracy.

            I’m thinking more in terms of how we, the public, are supposed to understand these documents. If those in question really are of a nature that loss or disclosure would result in a major security threat to the nation then the real scandal is that controls are so bad they’re ending up in private offices and presidential libraries for years without anyone noticing the breach of protocol. But if classified just means ‘stuff that’s kind of embarrassing’ or open secrets that are nevertheless awkward to reduce to writing then we need to adjust our view of the seriousness accordingly.Report

3. No, I’m pretty sure that this is like in football when penalties offset each other.Report

   1. I think the debate is whether Biden’s is a minor penalty and Trump’s is a major, in which case the latter would still be enforced.Report

      1. So maybe it can be like in hockey. The democrats have to sit in the penalty box for two minutes but the republicans have to sit in there for five.Report

      2. They are potentially different penalties, n as much as Trump had his people obstruct discovery and recovery for over a year while it appears Budens people reported the discovery as soon as it was made.Report

4. Also, it is bad is that Biden and his team knew about the classified documents before the November elections and chose not to say anything.

   No, it’s normal. The Trump situation had been going on for years, and didn’t become public until an impossible-to-keep-quiet FBI action.Report

5. The Biden story isn’t anywhere on the page. The Washington Post has a story on the front page, but it requires scrolling halfway down to find it.

   The Biden story has been front-page new every day there’s been something new. The newspapers aren’t hiding the story ; there was nothing today or yesterday. (There *was* a new revelation about Santos.) The front-page of WaPo headline that’s halfway down isn’t news, it’s an op-ed by Jm Geraghty of the National Review.Report

   1. Well conservatives are used to a media environment where something like this is on rewind hourly, so when they don’t see it in the “MSM” they assume the WaPo and others are actively burying it at the behest of shady government officialszReport

6. NPR had a very interesting piece in todays All Things Considered about classification. Last time anyone tried to calculate it there were around 50 Million documents classified per year by government officials. Because apparently the people who make such decisions have incentive structures to classify everything they see so as to protect their own backsides. Me thinks that ought to change.Report

   1. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/1149426416/the-u-s-has-an-overclassification-problem-says-one-former-special-counselReport

   2. One of the things people with access to classified material sign off on, every year, is a paper form with an explicit statement that classification is not to be used as a way to hide material considered embarrassing to the government.

      Oh, you don’t believe that they actually follow that because they’re a bunch of lying bastards? They’re your fellow civil servants, sir; that’s rather a rotten attitude to take about your coworkers.Report

      1. Oh, you don’t believe that they actually follow that because they’re a bunch of lying bastards? They’re your fellow civil servants, sir; that’s rather a rotten attitude to take about your coworkers.

         The backside protection comes in because if you DON’T classify when you should, then penalty is stiff. If you classify when you shouldn’t, there’s no concomitant penalty. That’s what I and NPR were discussing.

         Interesting to see where you took that though . . . .Report

         1. “Interesting to see where you took that though . . . .[sic]”

            ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not sure how else I was supposed to interpret “protect their own backsides”, I guess?

            And “but it’s difficult to know what I should classify” yes, one of the things you agree to when you sign the document for access to classified material is that you are a big boy now and can be expected to play the game at a higher level. (And if you feel uncomfortable with that you don’t have to sign the paper.)Report

            1. Take all this up with NPR and their reporter; and those who are doing the classifying.Report

            2. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of “secret” stuff isn’t particularly secret.

               It’s just the play pretend that you are forced to go through before they show you the *GOOD* stuff.

               If you can’t keep fake secrets safe, there ain’t no way you can keep real ones safe. So fake secrets are the first thing they give you.

               If you immediately run off and start telling the strippers about the TLEs for the *GOOD* satellites, they know that they should not give you access to the room with the dietary requirements for the lizard people.Report

               1. The breadth of classified information can be startling. From a friend who worked high up at the FCC, that agency classifies fairly large amounts of stuff involving non-public internal information from companies doing a big enough merger or acquisition that it’s subject to review.Report

                  1. And that’s probably unnecessary. The proprietary business information secured by the FCC in dealing with those mergers is often protected from dissemination under FOIA anyway by specific federal statutes. We do the same thing in commercial fisheries management work, and in support to BOEM for in their federal offshore energy leasing work. If the FCC is classifying that information, its probably because they believe its got a national security implication of some kind, or because they want to shield it from discovery in legal proceedings somehow. That latter use is probably not appropriate.Report

                  2. A (former military) friend says that you shouldn’t confuse secret and interesting.Report

                  3. Oh, I’m sure that Top Secret and higher stuff has some good stuff in there.

                     I’m just talking about regular run-of-the-mill “secret”.Report

      2. I mean, if you want to insist that it totally happens, then fine, I’m sure someone’s done it, but it’s not like it’s not addressed by the management.Report

7. They found six new ones at his mansion on Friday.

   I still want to know if it’s stuff like “medical checkups because the fact that Joe uses medicinal marijuana is a state secret” or if it’s stuff like Snowden leaked.Report

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