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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.
What we're seeing is the deep state continuing its politics by other means, but then finding that it can't put the genie back in the bottle and make sure that only the desired target got punished. Some bureaucrats didn't get the memo that an everyone-is-guilty rule was supposed to be used for selective prosecution. Instead they applied the rule fairly, which made everyone guilty.
The fact that they went after Biden doesn't mean it's not the deep state, it means that the deep state screwed up.
I think it means there's a few people within the bureaucracy who weren't on board with the overall goals, and had enough power to stir up some shit. Not enough to take Biden down of course, but enough to ruin the chance of anything happening to Trump.
Isn't it possible that some people in the deep state think Biden is getting old, and want to see him replaced by a younger Democrat? That's what voters in general want, if I recall correctly, and it seems reasonable to take voter sentiment as a prior for government employee sentiment. (Actually I think govt employees lean Dem heavily but that pretty much reinforces my point)
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