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Consider this a response to @naraburns' AAQC on classified documents.
U.S. classified materials are handled, for the most part, procedurally. There's a process to open the SCIF and one to close it. A separate, but similar, process for the safe. Creating a document means portion marking and filing, and if you ever want to generate something that leaves the room, by God, there's a process for that too. Even if it's a deliverable going to another room with the same level. Don't get me started on the security overhead to set up a facility, an information system, or an individual badge access point.
At a personal level, compliance is very easy. Do your work in the SCIF. Do not take anything with memory in or out. If you aren't sure, ask a specialist, because your employer quite is quite certainly paying one to handle that, specifically. Fill out all the paperwork. When you run into a roadblock, err on the side of doing nothing until the appropriate authorities
cover your assprovide explicit instructions. If this causes challenges or delays in your project, welcome to government contracting.This does not appear to be how Congress or the White House operate. How could it be? The President doesn't turn in deliverables, he receives them. Everyone involved has staffers; this includes said staffers. Running into uncharted waters with security can't mean a stop-work order, not when the "customer" is the President. As one moves up the hierarchy one runs out of authorities to cite. This moves from the realm of legible rules--and legible consequences--to a more nebulous situation. Responsibility is diluted, and it gets harder to point to any one scapegoat.
Clinton was always going to get away with it. She most likely never crossed whatever bright-line rules were created for the rest of us. She had people for that. At some point they looked for permission to set up such-and-such IT and found there was no obvious point of contact. And as is the standard human response, they shrugged and went forward with whatever they wanted anyway.
I'm going to bet that most Congressmen and Cabinet members run such risks. Biden and Pence and Trump seem to have done so with their filing cabinets and moving boxes. Who was going to sign their AFT form? Who was going to demand to see paperwork before packing up an office for the President or VP? The whole apparatus built around normal security operations sort of....grows sparse as the participants start to overlap with the authorities. Trump has pushed up against these category boundaries with remarkable consistency.
What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot. My God, it thinks, we just trusted people? Relied on their buy-in, rather than something we can measure and legislate? Their natural reflex is to patch this immediately, preferably with a new regulatory body or two.
The instinct of the media, on the other hand, is that a blind spot is boring. But a Bad Actor exploiting a blind spot--now that's newsworthy. It follows that most news coverage starts from the assumption that Biden, Pence, or especially Trump is a villain trying to abuse the system for personal gain. This is why the different response from Trump is important. It is ammunition for anti-Trump narratives, which are in no short supply. Playing along is boring. It's also anathema to Trump's campaign and to his personal brand.
I still don't think Trump will see meaningful consequences for his 45 Office. The difference in perception is happening almost entirely at the media level, not within NARA or the DoJ. They don't need a scapegoat to revise their policies, and they'll have a hard time finding one due to the spreading of responsibility. I am much more sure that Pence and Biden, as boring cooperators, see no consequences whatsoever.
I know I'm not exactly unbiased when it comes to this topic but I'm quibble with your characterization of the Clinton situation a bit.
The incident that kicked the whole mess off was that TSC/SCI material from outside the State Department was found in possession of a Clinton staffers' spouse. The material being marked for compartmentalization and having come from outside the state department is important because it means that Clinton was not the classifying authority and thus there was no way for it to end up where it did without multiple clear-cut violations of USC 18-1924. The fact that the tracking numbers had been whited out, further suggested knowledge and intent.
Granted, this was bad but likely would have been ignored if hadn't happened within the wider context of the Bengahzi hearings, and Clinton's response had been anything other than trying dismiss any and all criticism of her performance as sexism.
Let me be clear, this is the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal (one of), right? Where the FBI investigating him for allegedly sexting a 15 year old seized his laptop and found emails on it from/to his wife Huma Abedin, Hillary's aide and close friend and staffer, and they weren't just about 'where will we go for lunch on Wednesday?'
I can't even count up the regulations and/or laws being broken there in all sorts of ways and that's before getting into 'were these classified material?'
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Well, I find the Clinton case to be particularly egregious because it was done with intent to evade oversight. There were perfectly good State Department servers that had at least decent security. Instead of using those, she set up a parallel system, without any meaningful security. Then dozens/hundreds of times she knowingly did nefarious things, because instead of simply emailing to her private server from State servers, she had aids, print, then scan documents so as to get them onto the private server without "any trace".
Overall I agree with you, and this is why I feel that the wider context of the Bengahzi hearings is relevant.
@netstack's invocation of a hypothetical gray-area/blind spot where the participants start to overlap with the authorities, simply does not apply to Clinton because she (through her position as SecState) was not the classifying authority. As such her printing and scanning the documents so as to get them onto her private server "without a trace" was about as clear cut a case of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material as it is possible to ask for. Compartmentalized material was removed from the SecState's SCIF, copies were made, and those copies were transmitted to third parties and stored without proper precautions or authorization.
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