Dumb & Dumber - Classified Documents at Home
What gets me abut this is the raw stupidity & incompetence displayed by Trump, Biden, Pence, & likely, every other ex-President
Ok, first off Trump’s actions & reactions to the document issue are orders of magnitude worse than Biden’s Trump purposefully took documents he wasn’t supposed to, lied about them, hid them, and fought to keep them. Biden immediately turned them over and then proceeded to search for more.
So let’s look at the clean case of Biden (and likely Pence) where their intent was to follow the law. What the fuck is going on here? Why do they have any documents? Not just classified, but any?
First off, are classified documents handled so casually in the executive branch that they are strewn around anywhere, stored anywhere, and get thrown into random piles? Handling them this way is likely criminal. It definitely is gross dereliction of duty. And it shows zero respect for the security of those documents.
Second, pretty much every bit of paper in the White House belongs to the government. Everything there is supposed to go to the National Archives. So why is the President & Vice President taking any papers with them? They don’t have grounds to take any of this.
What they should be doing when leaving is give the National Archives everything and ask the archives to forward on anything they find that is not government property. That would be a logical, simple, clean process.
In addition, what are they going to do with boxes and boxes of documents? They’re not going to read them, they’re not going to scrapbook them, they’re not even going to be able to find anything in them because they have room after room full of boxes, each full of random papers.
I think this is what bothers me most of all about this - there’s no good1 reason for any of these papers to have gone anywhere other than straight to the Archives. This was blatant incompetence. This was stupid.
Yes I’m sure Trump had bad reasons to keep some of the papers.