If Trump’s classified document mishandling was ‘irresponsible,’ so is Biden’s
Nice try, Marc, but no one has ever cared very much if a few classified documents were accidentally taken from the White House when a president (or vice president) moved. Sure, we'd all prefer they be more careful, but it's not that big a deal for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
What is a big deal is deliberately trying to hide the documents and then persistently obstructing efforts to retrieve them. That's what the Justice Department cares about. Trump did it. Biden didn't.
The end.
"The End". If only this were so. My personal choice is for Biden to give the Republicans everything they ask for the day they ask for it. Offer up stuff they haven't even thought of. Bury them in paper. Biden (I sure hope) has the truth on his side. Use it like a stick with the Republicans.
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Is there any evidence that Biden’s team doesn’t do this? I mean, maybe they don’t deliver the documents on the same day because, having had to search for documents before at my office, the search itself takes some time to complete if you want it to be thorough and not just “well we gave them whatever was easiest to find.” But seriously, I’ve heard no allegations - like were rampant during the Trump admin - of Biden agencies delaying handing over docs and suing to keep docs hidden. AFAIK Biden *already* produces requested documents ASAP.
I managed to simultaneously roll my eyes and burst out laughing when I saw Marc's headline
This is really simple though...I've done a quick look around and people everywhere are still saying "but Trump declassified his documents"...There is no requirement that the documents be classified or not under the Espionage Statute:
18 U.S. Code § 793....
(e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
************
Just saying this is very easy...but also goes back to my position that Trump should have been prosecuted last June at the latest...Now I say this because any trial attorney will tell you, if they are honest, that they are or should be well aware that facts, that evidence, that the interpretation of the law, or that witnesses....can all go sideways on at any time, at the last moment, or, heaven help forbid, during trial itself...this is not to say that such events are perfectly common...but they happen with sufficient regularity as to not being entirely unusual either....
Sigh...we imperfect human beings
Fwiw this is a great example of where you can't get the law just by reading the statute. There haven't been a lot of cases where this is come up, but my understanding is that most lawyers who practice national security law say that it has long been assumed that the documents have to have some status as secret, and that the Espionage Act is a statute that courts are very careful about giving a narrow construction to.
Obviously there are serious issues as to whether President Trump actually declassified the documents he said he did. There's no actual record of any such declassification, and the Mar-a-Lago trove may also have contained documents that were declared secret by Act of Congress and which a POTUS may not be able to declassify.
But my understanding is it's pretty unlikely that courts would ever sustain an espionage prosecution over actually declassified documents.
Not only did Biden not obstruct anything, he facilitated it.
He also did not purposefully box up every classified document he saw laying around and ship them to Florida knowing he'd never have another chance, deny they were there, stall for a year and a half, claim they were his, hand back a trivial amount, get hit with a search warrant, demand they be returned to him, because they were his, and he is special, and not really classified anyway due to his mystic power of mind control, and then have still more of them turn up after that.
So many others deliberately miss these points, or are ignorant of the facts & choose to be.
Citizenship should include basic understanding of how our government is supposed to work, as civics classes used to do. But we still need better textbooks, not the kind many states choose to use now.
Conservatives almost universally think the president is a monarch and government's only purpose is to inflict harm.
Also, he sent his team out to ransack his house(s?) and other temporary offices he may have used, to see if there were any more... sadly, there were. And Biden's team in each case has notified the Archives and turned them in.
I susperct and hope that we'll see President Biden order a review of handling procedures and actual practices in the White House, with the goal of preventing this fiasco and the much worse case of trump's blatant theft and hoarding from taking place in future.
The truth doesn't penetrate that other universe the rightwing lives in.
Ah, Marc "Torture Boy" Thiessen.
never ceases to piss me off that major news outlets pay these assholes to lie to and mislead readers in an idiotic pursuit of "balanced" news coverage.
The Post isn't paying the likes of Thiessen, Hewitt, & a few others for balancing
the news coverage.
They're not Post reporters, but columnists so partisan that their rationalizations are offensive, even as the publisher & managing editor use them to balance the OP-eds page. Newspapers may not be required to provide such views, but managers obviously feel obligated to - especially since so many people automatically claim that The Post & other news sources other than RW ones all offer only biased liberal news. They'd prefer the Epoch Times, if nothing more radically right were available.
i get that they're opinion columnists, not straight news reported, but their columns are coverage of the news that shape opinion on the news. and the desire by newspapers to include them for balance is just destructive and stupid. you'll be labelled as "liberal" by the right no matter what, so just hire both straight journalists and opinion writers who tell the truth, even if the truth as a well known liberal bias.
The end? Seriously? It's almost like Kevin has no familiarity with how CNN and the New York Times operate.
Trump didn't "mishandle" anything. His actions were deliberate as was his obstruction. He stonewalled the National Archives, DOJ, and the FBI for 1 1/2 years, lying continuously about it.
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It's becoming clear that document handling procedures and practices in the office of the President and Veep need review and updating. If a straight shooter like Joe Biden has managed to haul stuff off and NOBODY NOTICED FOR YEARS, then whoever is keeping track has fallen down on the job.
Not to mention that former guy, who hauled off 50-60 boxes of the stuff and nobody noticed; tore up papers and nobody stopped him, and flushed yet more dox down his commode. Then there's Mark Meadows burning piles of documents in his office fireplace.
I agree that classified document handling procedures need some overhauling. But, as I understand it, NARA did notice early on that Trump had absconded with the documents and they tried patiently for a year or more to have him kindly return them, please sir.
I'm not sure why the documents Biden had weren't noticed for so long, but my guess is that the contents are less sensitive and the quantity is much less.
“Not to mention that former guy, who hauled off 50-60 boxes of the stuff and nobody noticed…”
Pretty sure the National Archives eventually noticed sometime after 1/21/21, since their noticing led to them politely asking for them back led to Trump refusing led to the FBI raiding to take them back led to us knowing about their existence in Mar a Lago at all. I mean, the mere act of noticing something’s missing from your collection does take a little bit of time, especially if you’ve got millions of objects in your collection.
I learned quite a bit about handling classified documents in the early to mid-80s at DEC, including the fact that people are unreliable and sloppy and classified documents easily get stacked up and mixed with other documents over time and shoved into corners and forgotten. (And computerization simply turbo-charged the mess - before computers you pretty much had to manually handle declassification - computer assisted search and replace makes it really easy to do bad declassification...)
It shouldn't happen, there's all kinds of rules and processes that are supposed to prevent it from happening, but it does happen - and often enough that a few years ago I found instructions at the National Archive and Records Administration web site for what librarians and archivists should do it they found classified materials mixed in with other documentation in posthumous bequests. The Clinton email excerpts I saw showed (to me) some indications that someone had been sloppy with search and replace of what were called "portion control" marks, used when a section of a classified document is LESS classified than the document as a whole. Those would normally have been removed in a thorough declassification review.
What TFG did was WAY beyond sloppy - that was a deliberate and gross act of espionage and should have been treated as such.
Actually, it shouldn't be easy to "lose" classified dox in stacks of other paper. They are supposed to have a stiff cardstock backing sheet that's larger than the 8.5x11 standard sheet, plus it's brightly striped in red or other appropriate color.
Digital did classified? Was this related to their Security Enhanced VMS, or other government type product?