The Mystery of America's Secrets Gone AWOL
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations
February 08, 2023
Charles C. Collingwood
If America’s greatest secrets are so crucial to national security, why do classified documents keep showing up where they shouldn’t?
Since last August, when federal agents raided former President Trump’s Palm Beach home seeking classified documents he had removed from the White House, national secrets have also been discovered at various properties connected to President Biden, including his Delaware home, and at former vice president Mike Pence’s Indiana home.
Although each of these cases were slightly different, they had at least one thing in common: The repository of White House secrets, the National Archives, did not appear to have a firm list of which documents were missing. While Trump claims he had the authority as president to declassify and retain any material from his time in office, Biden and Pence, who had no such authority (either as vice president or while they served in Congress), have said they had inadvertently taken the material with them when they left the veep’s office in 2017 and 2021 respectively. This raises another question: If even underfunded public libraries will flag the failure to return a borrowed book and send out reminder notices, why isn’t a similar process in place to safeguard America’s top secrets? Why weren’t Biden and Pence directed years ago to search their papers for the missing secrets?
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/08/the_mystery_of_americas_traveling_secrets_880464.html
