Leaders are meant to keep state secrets. Just not at home.
WASHINGTON — Democrats responded with aggrieved fury when former President Donald Trump was found in possession of classified documents that should have been turned over to the government when he left office. Then disclosures that President Joe Biden also mishandled secret papers set loose a Republican “well, what about” roar.
Now, with another discovery of classified documents, this time at the home of Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, the partisan finger-pointing seems to be melting into a chorus of mortification from Democrats and Republicans.
The highest U.S. secrets, it now appears, are not necessarily safe with the highest officials. Not when they’re in the hands of Trump, who disdains the rules and customs of government, and not in the hands of Biden and Pence, who subscribe to them.
“What the hell’s going on around here?” asked Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, when asked about Pence.
“Obviously there’s a systemic problem in the executive branch,” Rubio said. “We’re talking about two successive administrations from two different parties, with officials at the top level having, in their possession, documents in places that they don’t belong.”
The Democratic chairman of that panel, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, had tart advice for all ex-presidents and future ones regardless of party: “Go check your closets.”
The latest disclosure came from Pence lawyer Greg Jacob, who informed the National Archives — the proper place for such material — that classified documents were found in Pence’s Indiana home last week.
Jacob said an apparently small number of papers were inadvertently boxed and transported to the home at the end of the Trump administration and came to light when Pence, prompted by the discoveries in Biden’s home and pre-presidential think-tank offices, asked lawyers to see if he had some, too.
Special counsels are investigating the Trump and Biden episodes. In all three matters, the significance of the classified material and whether its mishandling breaches national security is not publicly known. But it is clear that some of the documents retrieved at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm
Beach, Fla., were top secret.
Trump, a Republican, took it as an affront that the government came searching his quarters for classified material he wasn’t supposed to have, even though he fought efforts to reclaim them for months, and the government was forced to issue a subpoena to get them. Aides to Biden, a Democrat, say they cooperated quickly and fully when such material was found at a former office in Washington, though they waited for months to make public what had happened.
In the Republican-controlled House, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, a contender to lead the Intelligence Committee, said he will ask for the same intelligence review and damage assessment in the Pence case as he did in earlier discoveries.
“It is a serious matter for any government official to mishandle classified documents,” Turner said.
Heedless handling of secure information by top officials became a politically charged issue during the 2016 presidential race, when Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, was investigated for her loose email practices as secretary of state.
Then-FBI chief James Comey concluded she and aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” but not willfully so, and he recommended against criminal prosecution.
The sprawling, ungainly U.S. government has plenty of people who can see at least some secrets and are supposed to keep them closely held. Some 1.25 million held top-secret clearance in 2019, according to a government report.
Leaks of classified information to the media aren’t uncommon. But lawmakers from both parties said something is broken in the classification system when a president, an ex-president and an ex-vice president are found with papers they are not entitled to have.
“I don’t believe there were ‘sinister motives’ with regards to the handling of classified information by President Biden, President Trump, or Vice President Pence,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tweeted. “We have a classified information problem which needs to be fixed.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he and Sen. Jerry Moran, RKan., have been working for years on an overhaul of the classification system, which he called a “broken-down mess.”
“The overall system is at the point where there is so much out there it is hard to determine what ought to be classified, and then it is hard to determine what should be declassified,” Wyden said.
Avril Haines, national intelligence director, “has begun the chore, for the first time really in years and years, to work on a bipartisan basis on this,” Wyden added. “I think it’s a gutsy move for her.”