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Hillary did something that, if I or anyone else with access to classified information had done, would have landed us in prison under the espionage act. I can forgive a former VP or President for having boxes with classified documents in their garage, locked store room, etc. Those guys live, eat, breath, and shit classified information for 4 to 8 years, the changeover is chaotic and shit slips through.
Actively sending classified information to a personally controlled server and effectively making digital copies of massive amounts of classified, export control, CUI, etc information is the kind of stuff they put people away for decades for. Let alone destroying evidence thereof.
What they are accusing Trump of doing would have netted a fine for the overwhelming majority of people and likely not prosecuted in the first place. Hell all of the charges are beyond the statute of limitations anyway and should be tossed on that alone.
It's not a new risk nor do we lack the resources to handle it cleanly. Why don't they have people making sure it's secure? Trump doesn't need to handle it personally, there are probably a dozen people he could get instructions from or fob them off to his staff.
I can forgive a college student for not having an immaculate room. People with money and people to make things happen correctly don't have that excuse.
Because it's difficult, politically sensitive, and low priority. A few boxes of aging classified information in ex-official's homes is not a big problem. Having people with high-level clearances comb through politician's papers looking for things which shouldn't be there is expensive and more importantly annoys the politicians. And expecting them to do it themselves, or hire appropriately-cleared people to do it, is what we have now.
Can you explain what you mean by difficult or politically sensitive?
I understand that it may not be the most pressing concern, but it still needs to be done. Same with a politician's annoyance, that's an irrelevant factor and they should understand the need to have this done correctly if they care about their country.
Ditto with expense, the US wastes lots of money. How much is it going to cost to have some people on hand to deal with this? Even at 150k salary per person doing it, that seems like peanuts.
I've already explained "politically sensitive"; anything that annoys former high-level politicans is going to be politically sensitive. Whether it should be or not.
By "difficult", it's mostly about getting enough people cleared at a high enough level to comb through this stuff. You can't just call up an army of GS-7 clerks to do it. You need fairly expensive individuals cleared at a high level, who then have to be exposed to a politician's ire for doing their job.
For some not very stringent definition of "need". Classified information moldering away in politician's basements and garages is unlikely to be a significant source of leaks.
And who likely have other functions/jobs to be doing as a function of their high clearance and don't want to be sifting through Politicians' papers for briefs that were of actual political sensitivity for 2 weeks 3 years ago and are yet still legally classified
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Why are you limiting your criticism to Trump, when Biden was caught doing the exact same thing, and probably the only reason they haven't found anything like that on any of the previous presidents is that they haven't bothered looking?
It was my understanding that Biden returned everything as soon as he realised he had it, while his predecessor refused to return documents upon notification by the National Archives, and repeatedly lied about having more things he wasn't supposed to.
Admittedly, I live in a fairly Blue-tribe circle; is my understanding incorrect?
Its roughly correct-adjacent. But it misses a few very important points, and is a generally irrelevant claim:
Biden had documents in less secure locations (Mar A Lago is a decommissioned SCIF) for longer. It is also worse that the government didn't know Biden had the documents. Also, there were documents classified at SCIF level from Joe's Senate days, which means he illegally removed them from the SCIF, or someone else did and gave them to him. Unlike Mar A Lago, where the documents were there, and never moved until the FBI decided to go gangbusters.
The cooperation line is silly because Biden is, essentially, cooperating with himself, while Trump was negotiating with a hostile DOJ.
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And then they found more.
Which, if I understand correctly, he also returned.
Were there any instances in which Mr. Biden either:
A: Denied possessing classified documents which he knew he possessed,
or
B: Refused to return classified documents which he was informed belonged to the government?
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Can you just ask me why I'm talking about the specifics before accusing me of being a partisan?
I'm talking about Trump because that's what the conversation is about. I said nothing about whether it is or is not okay for Biden to do the same. Gut reaction, no, it's not okay for him. But at least have the decency to phrase your accusation as a question.
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It's kind of an irrelevant comparison. The average State Dept. worker is not the boss of the entire State Department and can not have done what Clinton did. Clinton purposely implemented a system for transporting classified information outside of proper oversight and security channels. She didn't merely mishandle X number of classified documents; she intentionally ignored protocols in order to ensure that all of her classified communications were mishandled because she wanted to hide them.
To bring it back to the Trump/Biden boxes of documents, a more apt comparison would be if it were discovered that either of the Presidents had established an underground railroad that diverted all Top Secret docs away from the correct filing system and into a secret cave, and when the cave was discovered, all of the documents mysteriously caught fire.
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I don't know about the state department but in the DoD or DoE they absolutely would be looking at jail time. I have seen it happen.
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https://www.burnhamgorokhov.com/penalties-of-mishandling-classified-documents-in-the-united-states/
For the average person with access to classified information they would absolutely face prison time, and additional time for every count.
And I'm more pissed about this whole thing because after it happened we had to go through a ton more training and start portion marking every freaking line and paragraph on emails sent over the classified networks. MASSIVE pain in the ass.
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Sandy Berger got a fine and probation for doing worse than what Clinton did.
Has anyone ever been jailed for merely mishandling classified information without improperly disclosing it?
ETA - a quick google found this list of example cases. It looks like big shots like Berger and Petraeus get off with probation and fines, but small fry can get 3 months in prison if they are unlucky. The multi-year sentences all involved at least the appearance of unauthorized disclosure.
I think it is pretty clear Clinton would not have been jailed if she was prosecuted. Similarly, it would be an injustice if Trump gets jailed for mishandling classified information (assuming, of course, that he hasn't been disclosing it).
Clearly did wrong, but not worse than putting classified information on the open Internet.
???
Are you saying that sending classified information over unsecure e-mail is equivalent to putting it on the open Internet? I suppose it might be in terms of possible harm (although in the case of Hillary Clinton's e-mails this would be mitigated by the fact that they were probably never routed outside the US), but in terms of legal culpability it definitely isn't.
Yes. The classified information traveled (quite possibly unencrypted) over the public internet. They may or may not have been routed outside the US; Clinton's people had no control of that.
Actually we know that they were in fact routed outside the US - her private server was compromised and a copy of every email she sent from it was forwarded to a foreign power (most likely China).
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Until quite recently emails between different domains would have been transmitted in plain text. It’s not persistently available like a website, but any hop between the servers could read the contents of emails.
I don't. My words were "putting classified information on the open Internet".
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I mean, it's what we get drilled into us. I don't know if it's law, though.
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