John Krull: The slow-motion classified documents fiasco

John Krull

Let’s take inventory.

In August, FBI agents searched former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida and found a large stash of classified documents, many of them pertaining to national security, some of them bearing the highest security clearances. The search occurred only after the former president and his lawyers either denied he had the documents or declared he had no intention of returning them.

Then, in November, aides to President Joe Biden found a cache of classified documents dating back to his days as vice president in a private office he used at the University of Pennsylvania. Subsequent internal searches turned up documents in Biden’s garage and in other places in his home.

In each case, Biden and his representatives returned the documents to the National Archives as soon as they were discovered.

Then, here in Indiana just a few days ago, still more classified documents were found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence.

Those documents also were returned voluntarily.

The U.S. Department of Justice named special counsels to investigate Trump’s and Biden’s possession of classified materials. Those investigations have troubled — and, in Trump’s case, outraged — rabid partisans of the two presidents.

Tough.

At the very least, these episodes have demonstrated that the system of cataloging and tracking classified materials is broken.

The Biden situation shows that.

Joe Biden stopped being vice president of the United States at noon on Jan. 20, 2017. But no one seemed to notice that the classified material in his possession was missing for nearly six years — and then only because the president’s own subordinates found the mislaid papers and turned them in.

Recreational football leagues for 13-year-old boys do a better job tracking where helmets, jerseys and shoulder pads are than the National Archives seems to do with materials vital to national security. That must change.

If the materials are important to the nation’s defense, we should know where they are all the time. If we don’t, the argument that those documents are vital to our security becomes much harder to maintain.

If we know where documents are all the time, then holding people who have them accountable — even former presidents and vice presidents — becomes much easier.

So will toughening the requirements regarding presidential papers.

Former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama made that clear. They threw Trump, Biden and Pence under the bus when they said that, when they left office, they turned all their papers over to the National Archives, including the personal ones. They allowed the archivists to sort through the piles of material and then return to them those papers that were personal.

That, the former presidents said, was the standard practice for presidents — and, presumably, vice presidents — when they left office.

Clearly, though, that is not what Biden, Trump and Pence did.

So, the requirements for doing so should be further codified — and the penalties for violating those requirements stiffened so that future presidents and vice presidents will know that being caught with any documents they’re not supposed to have is a serious matter.

At the moment, it appears that both Joe Biden and Mike Pence made honest mistakes. They were careless in making their arrangements to leave office and carried away documents that didn’t belong to them and should not have remained in their possession.

Once they realized the mistakes they’d made, they owned up to those mistakes and returned the classified material.

Trump, predictably, is a different story.

So far, the evidence suggests that he planned to take the papers with him. When asked to return them, he either lied about having them or refused give them back.

He argued, in effect, that as a former president, the law does not apply to him.

If we’re taking inventory of the facts in this sorry episode of American history, we ought to make note of that difference. Because it’s an important one.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].