In the White House, the word “classified” means trouble.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential dreams were compromised by her use of a private email server that contained sensitive information.

Donald Trump faces criminal charges by refusing to return top secret government files after leaving the White House.

And now some lost files marked as classified may cause a headache for President Joe Biden.

The three situations are far from being equivalent. But taken together, they represent a remarkable period where records management was a recurring source of controversy at the highest levels of American politics.

For some it is a warning about clumsiness or arrogance in handling official secrets. For others, it’s a reminder that the federal government has built a cumbersome, and possibly cumbersome, system for storing and protecting proprietary information.

“Mistakes happen, and it’s very easy to grab a stack of documents off your desk when you leave the office and you don’t realize there’s a confidential document in those files,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who works on security issues. national security. “We just don’t find out, for whatever reason.”

Now Americans do not stop hearing about it. Political meetings have been filled with conversations about what documents are hidden in every box in every closet. Voters learn intelligence jargon such as TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information), HUMINT (Human Intelligence), and Damage Assessment.

Hillary Clinton emails

Clinton’s email server has been a major problem in her presidential campaign, and the Trump criminal investigation has dampened her hopes of a return to the White House.

Republicans who recently took control of the House of Representatives are now poised to look into Biden’s documentary practices as well, especially after a second batch of classified material is found.

“The American people are very aware of classified document issues, in part because we’ve been talking about them for nearly eight years,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political adviser.

It was then that a Republican committee in the House of Representatives investigating the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya discovered that Clinton had used a private email account while serving as Secretary of State.

The disclosure prompted a federal investigation that resulted in no charges, but it was determined that 110 of the 30,000 emails that were delivered to the government They contained confidential information.

Donald Trump’s boxes

Trump, who lashed out at Clinton for his handling of those emails, won the election and was quick to show carelessness with secrets. In one memorable occasion, he discussed classified information with the Russian ambassador to the United States, raising fears that he had endangered a source who had helped thwart terrorist plots.

Disputing the results of his election defeat, Trump left office in a disorderly fashion, carrying boxes of government documents to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. Some of them were turned over to the National Archives, which is responsible for presidential documents, but he refused to turn over any more.

Finally, the Justice Department, fearing that national security secrets were at risk, obtained a search warrant and found other top secret documents in the complex.

A special prosecutor has been appointed to determine whether to press criminal charges in the case or launch a separate investigation into Trump’s attempts to hang on to power on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the United States Capitol.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former intelligence official, said the situation with Trump’s documents is very different from what he encountered while working in government.

During Pfeiffer’s time as CIA chief of staff, a handful of times classified files were found in the wrong place in presidential libraries, he said.

“These are things that happen,” said Pfeiffer, now director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “Mistakes are made and things are found.”

He said that seems more likely to be what happened with documents marked classified that were found in an office used by Biden at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement after his tenure as vice president ended.

Biden’s personal attorneys discovered the documents and contacted the White House counsel’s office, and the next day the documents were pulled from the National Archives.

The situation looks like “an ordinary mistake” that “is handled according to the rules, like in textbooks,” Pfeiffer said.

However, he believed it would be prudent for the government to review its document-handling practices during transitions between administrations. It’s been six years since Biden left the vice presidency, which means confidential documents have long been out of place.

“It’s not good no matter how you look at it,” she said.

In addition to the files found at the Penn Biden Center, other classified material has been identified elsewhere, a person with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday, asking not to be named. It is unclear when or where the documents were found.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked a federal prosecutor to review the matter after the initial discovery e Even House Republicans have said they will investigate.

James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky who is the new chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, sent a letter to the White House on Tuesday saying his group will investigate “Biden’s failure to return vice presidential files, including highly reserved”. .

“The Commission is concerned that President Biden has compromised sources and methods with his mishandling of classified documents,” Comer wrote.

Joe Biden, “surprised”

Biden said this week he was surprised to learn what happened to the documents, which were discovered in November but whose existence has not been made public until this week. He said he didn’t know what kind of information they contained, saying his team “did what he was supposed to do” when they met.

Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman who worked for the Democratic president’s National Security Council last year, said it was unlikely such an incident would have made headlines were it not for the coincident Trump investigation.

“Penn Biden Center would have turned over that material, it would have gone to the archives and that would have been the end of the matter,” he said.

Miller noted that the situation is reminiscent of “the government classifies too many documents.”

“There’s no good process for declassifying them,” he said. “And when you create that structure, you unnecessarily expand the universe of classified documents that could be unintentionally mishandled.”

It’s not a new problem, and it’s a concern also shared by Biden’s top intelligence adviser, Avril Haines. In a letter to senators last year, Haines said there are “shortcomings in the current classification system,” calling it a “critical problem we face.”

However, Miller added, “no one has come up with a good answer to this problem.”

Source: Associated Press

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

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