Files and docs from previous gigs are usually considered company property. Why would someone be allowed to take them home when they exit the job?
Wait, are you changing the claim now? I don’t think anyone doubts that all VPs, senators, etc., have loads of files from their stints.
No, I’m not changing any claim. I’m addressing your statement about someone keeping files and docs from previous gigs. Do employers allow that? Not in my experience.
There’s a difference between…
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I’m leaving this job so I’m going to grab a huge pile of documents to take home as a souvenir.
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I take home documents regularly as part of my job so I can read things in my off hours, so I can refer to them when I get on a conference call from my living room, and so on. I put a stack of reports somewhere and forget about them, and 10 years later after I’m not working there anymore I run across them as I’m moving furniture around in my living room.
They’re both bad, but the first one is willful and the second is negligent. The second is probably far more common.
I see.
Of course, that example was to show why someone might not constantly go through their files from fifteen years ago. I’m not really interesting in a hijack of this thread to discuss business rules and regulations, which (of course) would be completely irrelevant to a senator’s or VP’s files. Since I seem to have a difficult time communicating with you, I’ll back out of this part of the conversation.
In another thread (now closed), apparently some documents were found at Mike Pence’s home in Indiana. I was saying there, that regardless of anything else, certainly the USA (and other countries no doubt) have a serious problem with how politicians handle classified material. When I was in the army, if we handled classified material so poorly, then we would be in serious trouble.
with all this happening, nara should have a supervisor on site when documents/offices are being packed.
Moderating:
Note: I did not close the thread. I advised the OP of that thread that we generally don’t allow it, but in this case, I felt the subject matter was clear enough that it wasn’t necessary to close it.
Please discuss Pence matters there. Thanks.
Oh, sorry. My bad.
No problem. It was a reasonable assumption.
…the thing is: Joe Biden isn’t “my guy.”
I’m not even American. I don’t live in America. I can’t even vote. And if I could have voted in the primaries it wouldn’t have been for Biden.
This isn’t a partisan thing.
For me, its entirely about having a sense of perspective.
This is “her emails” all over again. As we’ve just found out with Pence, I bet if we go digging through a whole lot of places we are going to start digging up a whole lot of accidentally misplaced Top Secret documents going back decades.
And the thing is: I don’t think this should come as any sort of a surprise. The sheer size and scope of the US Government makes this sort of thing inevitable. In a perfect system this wouldn’t happen. But no system is perfect. And the bigger and the more moving parts a system has, the more likely it is you will see failures. Banquet Bear’s Ultimate Theory of Chaos tells us this.
So when these inevitable failures happen there is only one thing you can do: you deal with them, learn from your mistakes, then move on. (Some might think this is three things: but those people would be wrong)
And this should point out the fundamental difference between what happened with Biden and what happened with Trump. With Biden we are well into the “dealing with it” stage. With Trump? Well they aren’t dealing with it very well at all.
Right now, Charles McGonigal, a special agent in charge for counter-intelligence at the FBI’s New York office, has been charged with " taking secret payments from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to investigate a rival, federal prosecutors said in an indictment on Monday." There are real, substantial threats to national security that are orders of magnitude more significant than these classified documents gathering dust in Biden’s private offices.
Just like with “her emails”, the tendency to blow these things out of proportion is a dangerous thing IMHO, and as we saw last time it was enough to turn the election. You don’t have to buy into the narrative.
Never mind, pence related.
I don’t think it is so much that anyone is allowing anyone, I think it is more that there is no system of control at all. Some politician in a SCIF gets handed a piece of paper, folds it up and puts it in a coat pocket and leaves with it. Who stops them and frisks them? And would they consent to this? I seem to recall a fuss being made about Congresspersons having to go through metal detectors at the Capitol. I suspect there are numerous politicians from any and all sides of the ideological spectrum who absolutely would not consent to a pat-down anytime they are around papers that have classified data on them.
And surprise, surprise, Pence has some papers too. Many others from both parties may follow although I would imagine there are a few people out there who are shoveling documents into their fireplaces right now rather than facing accountability. Is this a good thing? Or would it be better to know who has access to things they shouldn’t have any more? Because as it stands we know that papers will follow people home no matter what and those with malign intentions can load up fifteen banker boxes and refuse to give them back, which is currently dealt with by NARA spending a year asking nicely before getting the FBI involved.
This would be the common sense approach except for the logistical nightmare it would create.
This post could go in any one of the three threads regarding classified documents. I’ll put it here.
The AP released an article yesterday regarding such documents. As many have speculated on the Dope, document security is not a new problem. In fact, the article even references Jimmy Carter:
Former President Jimmy Carter found classified materials at his home in Plains, Georgia, on at least one occasion and returned them to the National Archives
And it’s not just presidents and vice-presidents.
It turns out former officials from all levels of government discover they are in possession of classified material and turn them over to the authorities at least several times a year
Furthermore, as we have suspected
Mishandled documents are often returned with little fanfare or national news coverage.
Here’s the full article. Worth the read, IMO.
It’s another example of people rediscovering issues and problems.
More from this shitshow.
It’s important to note up front that this was a planned search at the invitation of Biden, in the interests of being thorough. No warrant required.
Glad to see a US President inviting the search. That hasn’t always been the case.
No classified docs, but they did take some papers.
LegalEagle has a really nice video explaining the differences between what Biden did and what Trump did, and what the potential consequences might be for Biden (based on what little we know). It really gets into the particulars of the relevant laws, particularly the Espionage Act of 1917.
My biggest takeaway is that whether or not there is criminality depends on “willfulness”. When you are voluntarily contacting NARA because you discover classified materials, and hand it over immediately, it’s very different than if you intentionally take things you shouldn’t have, refuse to give them back, and then even lie about not having them.
Unless the misplacement of documents was due to “gross negligence”, but that is a very high bar to clear and difficult to prove. It requires something egregious; a reckless disregard for the standard of care.
None of that should be a surprise of course, since many have made the same argument in this thread. But it’s one thing to say what seems to be a big difference using common sense, and another to say what makes a difference based on what is written into law and used as precedence in court.