[Politics] Biden and Trump documents expose wider problem: Missing classified records not uncommon

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Yet problems with safeguarding such documents have been known for years, if not decades. And current and former government officials, security analysts and private watchdog groups have been pushing for reforms, with little success.

“We’re really seeing an existential crisis at the highest levels of government, at the presidential level,” said Lauren Harper, the director of Public Policy and Open Government Affairs at the nonpartisan National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. “And it’s something that we've certainly been saying needs to be addressed and reined in.”

Adds Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, "I'd bet you that if they go back to all of the living presidents and root through their homes and their libraries and their warehouses and garages, they're going to unearth some classified documents there."
Security lapses are not uncommon
Former President Donald Trump’s problems stem from his insistence that he declassified entire boxes of documents, his resistance to returning them and the fact top secret materials were mixed in with personal items. President Joe Biden’s lapses appear more accidental, his staff has said, and involve a smaller cache of classified documents from his time as vice president that was found at a former office and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
The White House has refused to comment on the nature of the Biden documents, including why the documents were in his possession for such a long period of time without anyone noticing. But CNN, citing a source familiar with the matter, reported that among the items discovered in a private office last fall were 10 classified documents, including U.S. intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.   

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed two special counsels, one each to investigate Trump and Biden to see if any laws were broken and to look for additional documents that may be in their possession.

Such security lapses are a somewhat regular occurrence, according to one former senior security official involved in protecting classified presidential documents under Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama.

A few times a year, a current or former White House official would alert authorities about a classified, secret, or confidential document that had turned up somewhere, and someone with the appropriate security clearance would be dispatched from the White House, National Archives, or FBI to retrieve it, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters under investigation. It happens frequently enough, he said, that the National Archives and Records Administration, as it is formally known, has formal written procedures for how to deal with it.
Mark Zaid, a lawyer who specializes in the handling of classified information, said such lapses date back to World War II or earlier, and are far more common than is known publicly.

“Before the Presidential Records Act was enacted during the Carter administration, these guys brought classified records home all the time,” Zaid said. “I have one in my library from the Truman administration that was top secret until 1994, but it was in the possession of Truman's chief of staff for half a century, at home somewhere because that's what they all did.” 

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 was enacted after the Watergate scandal, in which former President Richard Nixon tried to claim that his secret White House tapes and other records were his personal property. It states that “the United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records," but critics have said it's too vague in terms of what the law covers.

“Since the PRA got enacted, pretty much every presidential library and administration, Republican and Democrat, have had instances where classified information, unfortunately, was taken home or to an office,” Zaid added. “That’s not to condone it or excuse it because it has potentially serious consequences for an individual who is found to have mishandled classified information. But it happens all the time.”
Longstanding calls to fix the problems
The Project on Government Oversight is one of several watchdog groups that have been pushing for reforms, including more funding and authority for the National Archives so it can be more aggressive about keeping current and former administrations in line.

"I'd love to see Congress turn their attention to the more systemic problems here and propose fixes on what we need those (presidential) offices to do," Amey told USA TODAY, "as well as the National Archives, to make sure that classified materials don't leave, either in computers or in banker's boxes."
The National Security Archive, a research and public interest law organization that is not affiliated with the similar-sounding government agency, said the problems with safeguarding classified U.S. documents have been made much worse due to the relatively new explosion of new forms of digital and electronic information used by presidents and their staffs. 
At the end of each administration, Harper said, the law requires that all of those documents be sorted, cataloged and handed over to the National Archives for processing. Depending on their level of secrecy, most eventually will be made available to the public, either at the National Archives in Washington or at the libraries of former presidents. 

“Even without these kinds of extreme examples from the White House, given the sheer volume of electronic records that are being created, it is a disaster that gets worse, literally, by the day,” Harper told USA TODAY.

The U.S. government’s top secrecy czar agrees.

In his latest annual report to the president, which is required by Congress, the head of the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office warned of the “dire need” to revamp the entire system of protecting secret government records. That includes addressing problems created by the new forms of electronic records, as well as the longstanding issue of over-classification of millions of documents that probably don't need to be marked top secret, oversight office Director Mark Bradley wrote in the July 22 report.

Those problems, combined with the damaging effect that COVID-19 pandemic had on the work of the National Archives’ offices in recent years, means "we can no longer keep our heads above the tsunami of digitally created classified records,” Bradley wrote.
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