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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2579 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 2, 2022

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What people's impressions of the putative "stolen documents" in Trump's possession? I'm currently set to be highly skeptical of each new claim regarding what I won't believe Trump did this time, but the specifics here just seem weird - he supposedly has something like 200,000 pages of government documents. My immediate instinct to hearing that is that it's so many pages that he must have been operating out of his home as a remote office, staffers moved tons of documents, then didn't really bother returning them. I have no idea if prior Presidents have done anything similar. I could see it being pretty common and no one cares, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it's unprecedented since Trump really is a weirdo.

But the thing I'm really getting at is that I see people referring to "stolen documents" and claiming that these are really important docs... and that just doesn't square with it being a massive volume, from where I sit. What are these docs supposed to be and what do you think the odds are that they're anything anyone actually cares about beyond getting Trump?

Three postulates:

  1. The US government over-classifies documents on a massive scale. This has been an ongoing issue reported on for years in the press, it was widely pointed out in HRC apologia circa 2015-16 in NYT op-ed columns. Given the choice between risking something coming out and classifying it, they classify it every time.

  2. The regulations surrounding declassification are byzantine, labyrinthine, require a lot of paperwork and a sharp knowledge of bureaucratic procedure. This is reported on, and also obvious if you have two drinks with anyone with a clearance and chat about it.

  3. Donald Trump doesn't care about regulations or "doing things the right way;" his team is inexperienced and incompetent at paperwork and following bureaucratic procedure to a degree unprecedented in modern American history.

So he almost certainly broke the law, but I'd bet none of it was done with malice. Probably just carelessness, or kept them as sort-of "props" to talk about how important he was. I'd reckon the odds are it is just a bunch of random paperwork stamped "Top Secret" because he liked the look of it.

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