This Is Just Getting Embarrassing

With all the Far Right outrage over Joe Biden getting caught with classified documents from his days as Vice President at his home, finding out this afternoon that former Vice President Pence has this same problem makes this slightly enjoyable as schadenfreude (via Dustin Jones at NPR):

A "small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration" were collected by FBI officials from his Indiana home, according to letters from Pence's representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In a letter dated Jan. 18 to Kate Dillon McClure, the acting director of NARA's White House Liaison Division, Greg Jacob, a spokesman for Pence, wrote the documents were discovered Jan. 16 when Pence, "out of an abundance of caution" following the classified documents recovered at the home of President Biden, "engaged outside counsel, with experience in handling classified documents, to review records stored in his personal home."

Jacob said that the counsel identified a small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information interspersed throughout the records, but added the counsel was unable to provide an exact description of the folders or briefing materials...

Can I get an "Oops?" Did anyone say "Oops" for me?!?!

There's a gag now on social media of everybody running around checking their own garages for Classified Documents, with emphasis on the likes of Obama, Dubya, Clinton, and Gore pulling in the extra hours to ensure they're not caught. Nobody wants to harass Dick Cheney (shotgun clacking in the background) and Jimmy Carter is too honest (anybody joking about Carter building Habitats for Humanity out of documents ought to be ashamed of themselves). Nobody's asking Dan Quayle because we're pretty sure he never read anything during his Veephood.

For all the genuine scandal involving donald trump - HIS problem is he knowingly took boxes of classified materials and refused to give them up - and all the faux scandal involving Biden and now Pence who are working with National Archives and the Justice Department to properly return such materials, I want to go back to what I mentioned earlier about this: We are witnessing a serious problem with the lack of proper handling of classified documents across decades of different administrations.

I saw an article yesterday from Water Girl over on Balloon Juice, and I want to refer to the points she makes about the overwhelming amount of paperwork streaming through any Presidential office:

As a mid-level person with top secret classification, his (Andrew McCabe who podcasted with Water Girl) office was a SCIF.  He worked with dozens of top secret documents every day, he says he was “buried” in top secret SCI documents.  Receiving dozens of Top Secret SCI documents every day, he would have to read them all, and he could carry those documents out of his office to another agent’s office.

The other folks he worked with also had the same classification level, so those documents could be discussed with other agents that had a need to know.  At the end of the day, those documents never left the SCIF...

McCabe: "At this level – as a principal in an organization like the FBI, as Vice President, as POTUS – you need access to Top Secret, SCI information all the time, 24 hours a day. Staffers are constantly carrying these documents around.

• At work.
• At home.
• When you travel in the US.
• When you travel overseas.

McCabe: “There are people on your staff whose sole responsibility is to take those documents, transport them, carry it, store it, protect it, and give it to you when you need it.”

McCabe: “As a principal, it is literally following you around everywhere you go.”

McCabe: “Special security folks are responsible for taking care of all those documents.”

As President or Vice President, for instance, the documents follow you to the residence, to the office, as you get ready for the next briefing or a phone call with a world leader...

In short: You can't escape the paperwork.

What's the most likely answer to the reason why Biden - and now Pence, and likely other former White House occupants except for trump, who's an asshole about it - are finding a handful of classified documents on themselves years after their tenures as Veeps or Prezes is that with literally hundreds of such documents going in and out of your hands - and the hands of your handlers - something will get misfiled, stuck in the wrong drawer, and overlooked because nothing about that folder or paperwork said "Holy Shit I Don't Belong Here."

There is a scandal here (not for trump, who is earning his fate): We have too many documents stamped as classified. There's stuff not even related to foreign policy or domestic security matters that still gets stamped by a bureaucrat somewhere as "sensitive" and so the whole system has to treat it as such, even if that information gets outdated (or outed) years down the line.

Our intelligence agencies need to get together and re-evaluate their entire classification system, to ease up on the types of materials that our Presidents (and Vice Presidents, and Cabinet Secretaries, and Senators and Representatives) have to review every day of the job.

Pretty soon we're going to find out that Socks the Cat got caught with TSI paperwork stuck under his litter box. /headdesk

(P.S. Yes I know poor Socks is dead, but I won't put it past this Republican-controlled House to go digging through his poop for the cheap political points against the Clintons... again.)