I know. I’m mostly just being facetious, but my level of respect & trust has definitely been degraded by what we’ve seen in the last 6 years or so.
Yep. There’s going to be a lot of pearl-clutching about liberal hypocrisy when they don’t start building a pyre for Biden, but the issue was always about what happened after the government started asking Trump to give stuff back. If he’d complied at the outset we never would’ve heard about any of this.
Has this (government papers found after the officeholder left) really never happened before Trump? Or has it happened to, say, Reagan and they were returned and we simply never heard bc it was a simple mistake? I know that last part is unanswerable.
I’ve read a lot of presidential history, and I can’t recall it ever happening before Trump.
It’s probably happened but it’s also probably been a non-issue because it was unintentional and rectified upon discovery. Trump’s “I don’t have any documents and also I declassified them even though the FBI planted them and that’s why I want them back” is the new wrinkle - and by “wrinkle” I mean “sign of the immolation of the last vestiges of decency in American politics”
This X 1,000!
Of course, this kind of thing has to have happened in the past, considering the avalanche/tsunami of paperwork that swamps the Halls of Gummint! (Excuse my mixed meterological metaphors. And my alliteration.) It’s an issue now because of the extreme pilfering of classified documents pertaining to everything under the sun by TFG. If someone searched every square inch of every office in Washington, there would probably be misplaced/lost classified documents from Lincoln’s time, FFS.
Excepting the idea of classification wasn’t really a thing until the 20th century and even then the formal system as we understand it mostly applied to post-FDR presidents.
The Kentucky Republican added that based on research by his investigators following the Mar-a-Lago search, it was not uncommon for former presidents to accidentally leave office with classified documents. He also made clear that he thought it was unlikely Biden did anything wrong
The Kentucky Republican … made [it] clear that he thought it was unlikely Biden did anything wrong.
RINO!
… and that he was more concerned that Trump may have been treated unfairly.
That’s more like it.
Well, I was waxing poetic, but you know what I meant… 
We also never heard about it because the circumstances that resulted in secret document being left in unsecured locations is probably not something that the security establishment wants to advertise to potential adversaries. If Trump had fully cooperated with the archives there is a good chance that it would also have been discretely covered up. But its not possible to hide an FBI raid on a the home of a former president.
I don’t think we would have heard a thing about it if Trump had just coughed up all the documents. We didn’t hear anything until the FBI came to get them back months after the Archives had been “negotiating” for their return, and if I remember correctly, it was Trump himself who broke that news.
Apparently now it’s become tradition to always report it, accidental/inadvertent or not, whether or not the FBI had to retrieve them, etc.
They really should all be more careful. I can see it happening accidentally, but just maybe there need to be better protocols or something.
Another thing that was just traditional and assumed to be a good faith effort to return all classified documents until Trump tore through the WH like a bull in a china shop.
It’s a variation on the Streisand Effect.
According to Trump, pretty much everyone does it. Obama took millions of documents to Chicago. George HW Bush took millions of documents to a bowling alley/Chinese restaurant. Bill Clinton took millions to car dealership. GW Bush stored 68 million pages in a TX warehouse.
What’s lost on Donny Tanflab is that those other, more responsible presidents worked with the National Archives to determine which documents could be taken to be kept in presidential libraries.
He clearly doesn’t like anyone ever telling him what he can or can’t do. My youngest daughter is 8 and she’s finally past that phase.
If I’d known the National Archives were involved in so much excitement I’d have had a very different career path.
Well, who knows how many 2013-16-era documents Trump may have squirreled away? It’s perfectly plausible that docs that weren’t freshly-generated (i.e. that did have the requisite dates) had been presented to Trump in briefings in 2017 or even later.
When this story first broke my first thought was ‘was it the Secret Service who “found” these docs?’—because we know there are still a lot of guys in that outfit who love Trump. (Of course it turned out to have been Biden’s own lawyers who found them. And who, crucially, immediately reported them.)
^ Yep; this.
I would kind of love Obama to come out and say that just to troll the right. It would be pretty funny.
I don’t. I don’t think it would upset them in the slightest. It just supports Trump’s claims.
I know you know but just for the record: in those cases it was the National Archives who moved the documents to temporary secure facilities while the presidential libraries were being built. None of them just took government documents home for kicks and giggles.