And they called the FBI right away to come and get them. Plus he is working with the National Archives to openly look for any other documents. As you would want a public official to do.
@loriloolee you should add some comment to the OP, as I don’t believe we are allowed to just post articles or links alone.
I’m starting to wonder if I have some classified documents socked away somewhere. If only I could afford a lawyer to look for them.
The analogy would be the maid finding your teenage porn stash under your bed and handing it over to your parents.
This was totally to be expected. Boxing hundreds of thousands of records - remember nothing can be thrown away - by low-level staffers who do the grunt work will always result in a few papers to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Calls will now go out to search the homes and offices of Obama, Bush, and Cheney. Heck, maybe even Carter. Then the Executive Branch generally needs to investigate itself. Congress gets to see almost everything, so at least the Intelligence Committees’ members have to shut up and look inward. Not to mention former Generals.
The only outlier is Trump. Every other person in Washington makes it over the sane bar in this matter. Notifying the authorities immediately is the proper course that will be taken by everybody. Trump could have done this. He is is the instrument of his own destruction by obstruction.
I think one thing is clear, regardless that what Trump did was very different from the other documents being found. The USA (and almost certainly other countries) has a serious problem with how politicians handle classified documents. Sheesh. When I was in the army if we handed classified documents this way we’d be in serious trouble.
Moderating:
@loriloolee, we generally do not permit threads in P&E to be started with only a link. Some context and scope of the thread you contemplate discussing are required.
In this case, I see you’re a new poster and the subject is one that has already become well known, so I’m not going to close the thread. But please keep these rules in mind for any future threads you start. Thanks.
I sure will. Thank you.
Absolutely, and his actions started the whole mess. As other posters in other threads have stated, it was known by certain people that he had those documents, and they requested that he return them. Had he done so, this would not be an issue. There would have been no raid, no Special Master, no Special Prosecutor, no nothing.
Sorry about that. I should have known better.
Exactly!
Actually I guess the better analogy would your parents’ maid finding your teenage porn stash still under your old bed when you’re 38.
As usually, The Borowitz Report is on top of this scandal…
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-angrily-orders-pence-to-return-all-classified-documents-to-mar-a-lago
Thanks, Mike, we needed that. This will cut the self-righteous outrage of the reich wing to a dull roar. I think in Biden’s and Pence’s case, some staffer packed up stuff unaware of classification. Neither of them defied subpoenas, insisted the documents belonged to them, or had lawyers sign a false affidavit that there were no more classified documents to be had. I don’t believe either Pence or Biden committed a crime or would knowingly unlawfully retain classified documents. No need for a special counsel here.
I can hear Carlson now - “Do we know if Pence had legal immigrants working on his property? Could a housekeeper or landscaper have planted these boxes? I’m just asking.”
Carlson was puzzled and concerned that Biden’s private residence doesn’t appear to keep visitor logs, like everybody else.
Well, maybe. But they won’t give up easily: the right-wing talking point I’m hearing today is 'Mike Pence was fully transparent and made this public immediately, while Biden tried to keep his transgressions secret from the public until he was caught.’
Sadly, this does not have the virtue of being true. Both men (or their agents) informed the authorities immediately, but Pence didn’t go public with this for about a week—and only after a news source got hold of the story and broke it.
Still, facts never held Republicans back from advancing creative alternatives.
The rules are effectively different for the politicians who set policy, and military members, but so are, or should be, the secrets. If the document gives the war zone route you are going to patrol in the morning, that is my idea of a real top secret. And Mike Pence shouldn’t have been given that kind of secret. Instead, he should have been given digested intelligence estimates of what the CIA, looking at public information skewed by some of our wiretaps and such, believes Putin and the Taliban plan in coming months. This is information our adversaries already know, and so is not as important a secret, at least to me, as a secret military order that might be given a sergeant.
Of course, I’m partly speculating, because I can’t see your old classified documents, and I can’t see Mike Pence’s. It’s in the nature of the situation that government secrecy makes it hard to judge. And, in my opinion, that’s a reason why, in a democracy, the government should be classifying as few documents as possible.
I’m not totally speculating, because we know Trump was hiding classified letters — he called them love letters — from a brutal foreign dictator. There was no good justification for classifying those.
Trump is probably having a meltdown because he thinks Pence is keeping documents that belong to him, his personal property.
I’m not even talking about contents, just safeguards. If I left a secret document, unguarded, on my desk, then I would be fined. Pure and simple. March the guilty bastard in. 
An excuse of “Oh well, you see Colonel, I forgot that I had it so I just left it in the drawer” would not avail me of any leeway. In fact, that’s worse! I know a major that kept his security clearance card IN the security card scanner. We (one of my secondary duties was security officer) warned him a couple of times (such is the nature of him outranking me and my warrant officer), then we went to the colonel. He got fined. With that card in the scanner, anybody could access anything that he could access on the secret network. The odds of that happening? Well, near zero. They would have to get into a secure building, which requires a security card, but he got a hefty fine none-the-less.
It is just remarkable to me that so many classified documents are turning up. Not in the Trumpian way (imma take this yoink) but just the “Oh… those, yeah I forgot about those”.