‘Not As Bad As Trump’ Is A Lousy Excuse
Goal-setting is a common practice. Whether one is an athlete, musician, businessperson, or some other profession, people often say, “I want to be the next…” followed by a person considered tops in that field.
“I want to be the next Jimi Hendrix” is a common goal for guitarists. I’ve heard no one say, “I wanna be the next CC DeVille.” Also never heard, “I want to be the next Jose Canseco” or “I want to be the next Bernie Madoff” (though, until all came crashing down in 2008, and people learned Madoff made his fortune off one giant Ponzi scheme, many people probably said it).
The point is, people set goals and aspire to achieve the heights others have in the past. By the same token, people also level-set using a floor, or better yet, a benchmark used as a standard or reference point against which they compare themselves or make a self-assessment of how they’re doing.
Sadly, people use low benchmarks for their “achievements” and worse, use them to compare their failures or transgressions. The latter is a common tactic in modern-day politics, and pathetically, Democrats have decided that Donald Trump, of all people, is their benchmark.
We’ve witnessed that, most recently with the revelation that Joe Biden’s lawyers found classified documents at Biden’s “think tank” and in his garage at his Delaware home. Naturally, some brain-dead partisans on the right immediately said that it absolved Trump of any transgressions because Biden did it too. That’s entirely nonsensical.
However, the immediate reaction by Democrats and most of the press was, “This isn’t the same as Trump!”
Ok, so what?
Let’s immediately stipulate the Trump situation is worse. After all, Trump fought returning the documents, and had lawyers fib and say they returned everything when they hadn’t. Any chance Trump would face prosecution would come not from the mishandling of classified information, but on an obstruction of justice charge.
So there, we have that out of the way. The two situations are not the same. But is the Trump standard where Biden supporters want to plant a flag? When the story broke about Trump having classified documents in his personal possession, Joe Biden went on 60 Minutes to wag a finger of shame at Trump, asking, “How could anyone be that irresponsible?”
What was Biden’s reaction when news broke that his lawyers found some classified material in the garage of his Delaware home next to his Corvette? When asked, “What were you thinking?” by Peter Doocy of Fox News, Biden quipped, “… my Corvette is in a locked garage, ok? It’s not like it’s sitting out in the street.”
Suffice to say, I don’t think the people behind the Mission: Impossible franchise will have Tom Cruise performing the task of breaking into the garage of a suburban Wilmington home to retrieve classified information.
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. They found the Super Secret Secure Stash of Locked Garage Corvette documents on December 20th, and the administration said nothing then, either, and they won’t say why.
But they should and it is up to the entire Washington DC press corps and not just Peter Doocy of Fox News to continue to ask why they didn’t disclose the information, and not accept or merely move on from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s obfuscations and circular reasoning.
Is it bad that Biden had classified information at his “think tank” and in his garage? Yes. The answer is “Yes.” That’s it. If some jackwad wants to make the case that it does not differ from what happened with Trump, it demands a response. But if the knee-jerk defense is, “Not the same!” you’ve lost the plot.
Election denialism elicits a similar response. No, what Stacey Abrams, Hakeem Jeffries, Jamie Raskin, Hillary Clinton, and others have engaged in is not as bad as Donald Trump. But to pretend what they did is not bad because it’s not on the same level as Trump is highly disingenuous. Establishing a benchmark where denying the results of an election, blaming a loss on voter suppression with no evidence, or saying someone’s election was “illegitimate” is acceptable so long as it doesn’t result in violence is asinine.
The DC press will do their damndest to forget the classified documents issue goes away. As I write this, the top story on The New York Times website is yet another story about George Santos. 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. That’s disappointing but not surprising.
Plenty of reporters exist who can dig around and do some investigative reporting to see how far it goes and if there are other locations with more classified materials. Additionally, the White House has a duty to explain why this information didn’t see the light of day for two months. The special counsel should make available its findings to House and Senate committees that investigate the issue.
The rule of law, and the integrity of the press, demands a full investigation. Brushing it aside using the Trump benchmark is unacceptable.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Where’s the gov’ts guy doing this?
Apparently out to lunch.Report
More like his boss saying “you DON’T ask these questions of “important” people”.Report
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
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
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
Any policy or process that depends on no one ever committing a human error is fatally flawed.Report
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
Agreed.Report
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
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
No, I’m pretty sure that this is like in football when penalties offset each other.Report
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/1149426416/the-u-s-has-an-overclassification-problem-says-one-former-special-counselReport
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
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
“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
Take all this up with NPR and their reporter; and those who are doing the classifying.Report
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
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
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
A (former military) friend says that you shouldn’t confuse secret and interesting.Report
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
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
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