Once upon a time, people knew how to keep a secret.
Nowadays, all you have to do is go rummaging around in the garages of old people who are retired from government service, and it seems all kinds of classified materials can be found in the boxes of stuff they brought home from their offices.
First, it started with former President Donald Trump. Everyone got their panties in a wad about how he had taken classified documents home with him to Mar A Lago. The FBI raid didn’t help matters much in getting each side to agree that “we shouldn’t allow people to take their work home with them when it comes to classified documents.”
Sure, the situation is a lot more complicated than that, but we can boil it down to this fact: whatever they found, it wasn’t something that former President Trump should have kept when he left office. Even if they were blank folders, you don’t mess around with state secrets.
Then after all that bro-ha-ha last summer, we come to find out that President Joe Biden had classified documents in his office of the former vice president, and at his home in Delaware. Documents apparently that date back to his time in the U.S. Senate.
No excuse. Don’t care if he’s a Democrat or Republican. Just… makes me want to bang my head against the wall when you hear stuff like this, and his “well it wasn’t like my Corvette was sitting out on the street” line trying to justify that it was still locked up… oi vey. The two situations are different – even on the surface of things – but are still BAD BAD BAD.
You don’t mess around with classified documents. Plain and simple.
THEN JUST THIS WEEK we’ve learned that of course. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s house was found to have some documents as well. Both sides are shouting at one another now like hyenas fighting over the slim pickings left behind by the lions.
What in the world is going on here?
The whole concept of “Top Secret” and “Classified” now just feels like a sad joke. It doesn’t help that it seems like
Across the United States today, there are 1.3 million people working with some kind of information that falls under the various levels of classification that are setup to control the nation’s secrets. Let’s say that… half of that number is a contractor or someone working as an engineer for the defense industry, etc. They’ll have limited access to only what they are working on and not the kind of codeword clearance CIA secrets that those working in agencies within the government would have access to at any given point in their careers.
So let’s then make the assumption that somewhere around 650,000 federal employees have a reason to have some sort of clearance to look at and know about certain secret materials. Based on figures I found online, there are more than 18 million people who are employed by the Federal government.
Only 3% of everyone who works for the Federal government has access to some level of materials that are kept away from public eyes for various reasons. That’s in the grand scheme is not a lot folks… But enough to make this a likely LARGER problem than what’s happening in the White House and Executive branch when it comes to classified documents.
Are people just packing things up haphazardly when they are leaving the office and not remembering what they had on their desks or in filing cabinets? Is this about being about to write memoirs clearly for future generations to read? Does any of this feel… sinister?
In the case of all three who have thus far been found with documents – a former President, a President and a former Vice President – it seems to me like these old guys had other people packing who didn’t know what they were grabbing and just took off and left.
This behavior in no way excuses the actions of Trump, Biden and Pence or those around them responsible for packing up their offices when it was time to go.
It also presents a real threat in that we now have to consider what may still be out there in other people’s garages, basements and attics that can end up being revealed without consideration of the consequences by individuals who don’t understand what they are looking at in the moment.
Social media presents this persistent threat daily because (and there’s no other way around this) a classified document posted on something like Facebook or Twitter gets immediate attention. As much as Kylie Jenner wearing a lion’s head.
What America doesn’t need in the long run is a bunch of Leftover Secrets being dumped onto the public’s head because someone’s dad or mom couldn’t be bothered to use a shredder and clean out the boxes of junk in the garage when they retired.
Obviously, changes need to be made immediately in the way that classified materials are handled by leadership on every level. It is clear that a much deeper investigation into what copies might be floating out there needs to happen on a broad scale, and starting with all these old white guys who have been in power forever. There’s no telling what might be hiding in Mitch McConnell’s attic, or Dick Durbin’s.
So let’s find out. If the FBI is going to conduct raids, let’s get them to really conduct raids of everyone who might pose a risk by holding onto these documents. Old Grandpas seem to be the prime suspects at the moment. This at least gives the feds a place to start the process.
It can’t be a one-sided affair. Everyone who has a clearance needs to get their crap together, because enemies foreign and domestic will ultimately use information revealed against us, and the outcomes won’t be pretty for anyone involved.
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