USA TODAY International Edition
Far too many government documents are classified
The documents controversy has expanded beyond former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. Classified documents have now been found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s home, a representative for Pence wrote to the National Archives in letters this month.
The document cases dramatize what national security experts of every political stripe have known for decades: Far too many U. S. government records are classified.
An example is the classification of millions of documents ostensibly tied to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination: Each release of a new trove, most recently last month, has prompted questions about why most were classified in the first place.
In examining another American tragedy, the bipartisan 9/ 11 commission found that far from protecting the United States, excessive classification had left our country vulnerable to the terror attacks by restricting important intelligence findings about al- Qaida and other jihadist groups to too few essential U. S. security figures.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R- Utah, said at a 2016 House hearing that the government had spent $ 100 billion over the previous decade on “security classification activities” – much of them unnecessary, and some of them harmful.
You can draw a direct line from the needless classification of material stretching back well over a half- century, deep into the Cold War, to today’s toxic distrust of the government among tens of millions of Americans.
In supporting legislation to streamline the classification system, The Washington Post editorialized in 1998: “Excessive secrecy is expensive, breeds popular distrust of government and withholds from historians, researchers and the voting public information that is important.”
That measure failed to pass, instead giving rise to a bureaucracy now at the center of the Trump and Biden imbroglios – the National Archives and Records Administration.
Soviet- like collection fiefdom
The late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover bears some responsibility.
As the first head of the domestic intelligence agency, he turned it into a vast, Soviet- like collection fiefdom that too often had more to do with his personal proclivities and animosities than with the nation’s security. Belatedly released records show that he paid informants and planted listening devices to gather evidence of alleged extramarital affairs and communist ties of Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2021, USA TODAY quoted a Senate report’s conclusion that the Commerce Department had acted as “a rogue, unaccountable police force across multiple presidential administrations” in targeting its Asian American employees. The report found that a departmental division called the Investigations and Threat Management Service had used “overclassification of documents to protect the unit from external scrutiny.”
The federal classification system has three main tiers: Top Secret, Secret and Confidential. The most highly sensitive records are stamped Top Secret and truly need to be closely guarded, seen by a limited number of vetted officials with high- security clearances, in order to protect the United States against real harm by foreign or domestic enemies.
They can be viewed only in SCIFs – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities that look like giant bank vaults and normally can be accessed only by accredited individuals using eye scans, fingerprints or complex entry codes.
But far too many Secret or Confidential documents protect the individual reputations of analysts whose forecasts proved disastrously wrong.
An example is the lead- up to the Iraq War debacle when Vice President Dick Cheney made unprecedented personal visits to Langley to pressure senior CIA officials to alter intel assessments in order to support a U. S. invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
As a Moscow correspondent, I shared lunch or drinks with U. S. Embassy diplomats who confided that much of the information they weren’t allowed to tell journalists came from reading those journalists’ articles!
Later, as a Pentagon reporter, I was frustrated by military or civilian officials who’d tell me things off the record or on background that were either common knowledge, available online or had no possible intelligence value.
A major flaw in today’s classification system is that it was created in the preinternet era when information was much less fungible.
In addition to frustrating journalists, the overclassification and extended retention of government records stifle academic research, which policymakers depend on to make informed decisions.
Responses from Trump, Biden
The problem with Trump’s response to FBI inquiries of the Mar- a- Lago documents, as with his responses to so much scrutiny of him, is that his overwrought, accusatory declarations make them appear more sensitive than most of them probably are.
Far savvier is Biden’s apparent response of disclosure and cooperation to the more recent discovery of classified records at the Penn Biden Center in the nation’s capital and at his own home in Delaware.
History suggests that the bulk of the restricted documents found in both presidents’ personal possession contain information already in the public domain – or information that should be in the public domain.
Unfortunately, Americans likely won’t learn this key fact until it is much too late to matter.