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Notes -
What do you do when caught with top secret documents? Deflect:
Of course, this time it’s Joe Biden, not Donald Trump. The President’s staff has handed over several documents, including TS//SCI, leftover from his time as VP. His personal attorneys found the documents on November 2nd while clearing out a closet in his former Penn Biden center office, immediately notified NARA, and handed off the hot potato the next day. Since then the DoJ has appointed an attorney to figure out who’s responsible for the illegally handled files. Other than that, most everyone involved has refused to comment unless they represent one of the parties in court.
Now for the obvious comparisons:
The type of documents seem similar to those kept in Mar-A-Lago, and were haphazardly filed in a similar manner
NARA didn’t know about (or request) the missing files
If Biden’s team is concealing more documents, they’re doing a much better job
The FBI is watching but not serving any warrants
Perhaps most importantly, the President is deflecting and denying rather than crying “witch hunt”
This leads, naturally, to two movies on one screen. Either the President is taking all the right actions after some staffer’s fuckup, or the security state is shamelessly giving him a slap on the wrist. What few outlets are writing on the subject fall into these two narratives. Democrats can’t help but compare the “scope and scale” of the violations, while Republicans emphasize the lack of door-kicking.
Neither stance addresses the real deciding factor of a smoking gun. This is going to be a Hillary situation. Like her infamous server, responsibility is diluted enough that no charges will be brought. (Note that I’ve made the same prediction about Mar-A-Lago.) Both narratives will try to spin epistemic uncertainty into iron-clad assurance, thus adding no value.
The only real conclusion is that you or I wouldn’t get off nearly so easily. If you’re going to store classified documents for your job, you’d better talk softly and hire a big staff.
One thing that really helps keep it this way is the illegibility of whether there's anything substantively relevant in the documents. My prior is that most classified documents are wildly overclassified and that nothing much would happen if they were handled carelessly and illegally. When I hear that Biden and Trump have handled them carelessly and illegally, my first instinct is to ask, "OK, but does anyone actually care and was there anything actually important there?". That the answer tends to be, "can't tell you, it's top secret" allows people to form more or less whatever ideas they'd like about how important the documents actually are.
If nothing else, the news is pretty amusing. It certainly makes it a fair bit harder for Biden to go around pulling the "I would never" routine and be taken seriously.
One thing I’d like to know is if trump had any documents which were compartmentalized, Joe Biden actually did and top secret conpartmentalized is a much more meaningful designation
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