Yes. And no one knew about them at all.
The National Archives only learned of it because Biden’s legal team contacted them and made immediate arrangements for their return. As anyone should do if they find classified materials in their inadvertent possession.
I agree with you on that being quite bad.
But I never thought that Trump retaining worthless (from the point of view of what a reputable auction house might take and sell) and likely over-classified documents ranked high on the list of his misdeeds.
I wonder if the other living former U.S. Presidents, vice-presidents, and Secretaries of State, Defense, and Energy are reviewing, at least in their minds, whether they may have any secret documents that they shouldn’t have. If all of them except Biden and Trump were meticulous in leaving physical government property with the government when leaving office, then there is legitimate reason to wonder about Biden. Or is this common?
When you have evidence that this was the case, please be sure to post it.
I was thinking that it would be both unpatriotic and illegal for an American auction house to sell classified documents, unless there is clear documentation of declassification. Is that the part of my post that needs citations, or is it something else?
The part that they were “likely over-classified” documents.
Do you have something from a person who hasn’t insisted that people should not take him literally?
I mean, I find a lot of stand up comedians entertaining, but I wouldn’t cite their jokes as facts.
Yes, that statement was a personal opinion.
Nuff said
I can go all day. Not that it will help, I’m sure. Or do you only trust Fox News? Because their own legal folks made that claim.
My apologies to Atamasama with the NPR reply. Too much bourbon.
But the Tucker piece I linked was not a fact thing, but opinion. Disagree with the opinion, fine.
I still think the opinion has merit.
Apology accepted. Bourbon is awesome.
I spent 10 years working for the U.S. Department of State. Even at my low level, I saw dozens of classified documents every single day, and probably a half-dozen of those were stamped top secret. As you move up the food chain in government, the number of classified documents you deal with increases by an unimaginable factor. And the classification often seems arbitrary. I recall seeing cables marked “Secret” that were only announcing someone’s birthday. Now, this is just in one department.
The DOS generates a humongous amount of cable traffic from its overseas embassies. And, in turn, the department generates a like amount back to overseas posts. The subject matter of lot of these cables can end up at the highest levels of the department, congress, and yes, the White House.
Now imagine interagency paperwork, much of which is classified at one level or another. Reams and reams of memos, letters, cables, and other communiques. Letters dealing with the most sensitive matters imaginable. It’s a small miracle that reams of them aren’t misplaced (and perhaps they are).
So when the amounts found in both Trump’s and Biden’s possession are this small (yes, 300 is small), one has to turn to intent. How was the discovery handled? Were they promptly turned over? Was there an attempt to hide or destroy them? In Biden’s case, 10 or 15 documents could have easily and inadvertently been included along with the piles of personal papers removed from the White House. People are fallible and accidents happen. In Trump’s case, several hundred documents that were clearly stashed together looks a bit more suspicious.
Given all this, it’s somewhat hypocritical that the new House majority is pursuing this, while I’m fairly certain that they are frantically scouring their own offices and homes to make sure they haven’t accidently removed and documents themselves. But any leverage is good leverage, right? And there’s nothing like tit-for-tat to get the masses riled up. Meanwhile, meaningful governance goes wanting.
To be fair, he did do it, too.
I think you missed the cites that say that Fox News says that reasonable people shouldn’t take Carlson seriously.
Reasonable people don’t watch FoxNews in the first place.
Except the judge in the March 9 article did take Carlson seriously, as evidence that some people at Fox, namely like Carlson, were pushing back hard on the « steal » arguments, and that undermined Fox’s defence.
If it is “common” for classified docs to end up in politicians’ personal papers, oughtn’t we expect a large number of disclosures from other past presidents, veeps, congresscritters, cabinet officials, etc - from both sides? Or a report from the Archives documenting how frequently it was handled quietly in the past?
Doesn’t seem likely that it was just Trump and Biden.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that, yeah, it happens, but it’s never been noteworthy because the materials were always immediately surrendered when found. Trump changed the rules because he did it deliberately and then fought recovery. If there are any records of prior incidents, it would certainly be illuminating.
I find the opposite implausible. As VP and even thereafter I imagine the only interaction he had with documents was to have them handed to him by a staffer and to hand them back to a staffer. The notion that he did any of the filing himself, or had anything to do with the nuts and bolts of the document flow through his office, is pretty tough to believe. That goes double for moving documents from one office to another or to storage.
He still owns it, of course, because he’s responsible for what goes on in his office.
So you are suggesting that a staffer went into a secured document facility, snuck out secret documents for some reason, took them to Joe Biden’s garage in Delaware and left them in a box?
Do ‘staffers’ even have access to such documents? Is there any evidence at all that this is what happened?
By the way, the house was being rented by Hunter at the time, who we all know is extremely careful with documents and secrets.