OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

[T]he U.S. government is awash in literally trillions of pages of classified documents, and the proper handling of those documents is a challenge for all who use them as part of their daily government work. In my 30 years in Washington, I have spoken to a number of officials who have accidentally taken classified documents home with them, perhaps tucked away in an otherwise innocent looking stack of papers or file folder. Because the penalties for doing so are so severe, the reaction is often deep anxiety bordering on panic.

You work to make sure it never happens but sometimes it does. And when it does, there is a proper way to handle the problem--which is precisely the way the Biden team has appeared to handle it. You inform the proper authorities within the organization with which you are or were associated. And you return the documents immediately.

The handling and care of such documents is hammered home to all who work in the government. The fear of a mistake and its consequences therefore are also common. That is why while the story of the discovery of the Biden documents hits close to home and makes uncomfortable the current and former officials with whom I have spoken, the way former President Trump treated the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago makes them angry.

Because based on what we currently know about them, the two cases could not be more different. Despite GOP efforts to suggest the two are the same, they could not be more different. Trump expressed a desire to hold on to the documents. He was told he could not. He took them anyway. He was repeatedly told he had to return them and he refused. He lied about whether he had them. He resisted government efforts to reclaim them. He has argued they were his documents and did not belong to the government. He has argued he declassified them although evidence suggests he did not. He flouted the law and very likely broke it. There is zero evidence nor is there even the slightest hint Biden did anything of the sort.

Merrick Garland and John Lausch announce the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate the discovery of classified documents held by President Joe Biden at an office and his home, on Jan. 12, 2023, in Washington, DC.

Ultimately, it is likely that the parallel special counsel investigations into these cases will reveal just that. Fortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland has made the decision to treat the two cases in the same way to show that he is being even-handed...but also because in the end, it will underscore the differences between the two cases. [...]

One of the reasons so many officials have feared the circumstance in which Biden now finds himself is because so many encounter classified documents in their day-to-day work. Classifying so many documents makes the likelihood of errors higher. But it also makes it harder to share or find information necessary to policymakers. And the cost of classifying trillions of pages of documents is billions of dollars a year. Further, in our system, classified documents are seen by many to be "more important", more attention-grabbing, than unclassified ones--which leads to excess classification which leads to valuable information being harder to access and utilize.

Experts have sounded the alarm about this problem for decades, and every few years there is even a call to fix it--but it never happens.

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