Last week, classified materials were found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home. Of course, that discovery followed the discoveries of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s vacated office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and at his Delaware residence. And those two cases came after the FBI executed a search warrant to retrieve documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida. Also, in December, Trump’s attorneys reportedly found two documents with classified markings at a storage unit in West Palm Beach.
If my local library can send me emails demanding I return an overdue book, then the White House can track when a president or vice president handles classified material.
We track local library books better than we manage classified White House documents. It’s time to do something about that.
According to The Washington Post, the sloppiness of record management over even some of the most sensitive intelligence in our government and at the highest levels of government has led the National Archives to ask all past U.S. presidents and vice presidents to search for documents in their personal homes and offices.
Presumably, past leaders including former President Jimmy Carter and former Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle will be looking for more than loose coins under their sofa cushions. Political cartoonists and late night comedians are having a field day mocking the lunacy of all of this. And they should. Because there’s a better way to do things than have classified information printed on paper and passed around. And there’s a better way to do things than have the National Archives get involved with document management only at the end of an administration.
The Justice Department is understandably focused on addressing and resolving each of these matters, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed special counsels for both the Trump and the Biden cases….
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