Donald Trump seems to be the only senior government official that has gotten into serious trouble over his handling of documents. Thomas Lipscomb, writing at Real Clear Politics, examines the turnaround underway at the National Archives, where many, many records are missing, including lots from the Obama Administration;
…the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system by engaging in private email exchanges. So far, former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Lynch and several EPA officials have been named as offenders. The IRS suffered record “losses” as well. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called it “an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws.”
Clearly, America’s National Archives is facing the first major challenge to its historic role in preserving the records of the United States. What good is the National Archives administering a presidential library, like the planned Obama library in Chicago, if it is missing critical records of interest to scholars? And what’s to prevent evasion of the entire federal records system by subsequent administrations to suit current politics rather than serve scholars for centuries to come?
National Archives Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC
A friend writes,
One thing seems clear, presidents and other high-ranking government officials have not taken their obligations to protect classified information and government and government records seriously for a long time. It’s pretty plain that it was not only Donald Trump, but Joe Biden who we’re not careful to protect classified information when they left office. In fact, Biden had no right to take classified information when he left office and he was not careful to protect the information he did take.
While Lipscomb compliments the digitization efforts being made at the National Archives, he sheds light on the relatively light punishment (Berger was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and probation and fined $50,000) dealt to Sandy Berger, former Clinton National Security Advisor, for deliberate and malicious destruction of pertinent records:
…marginalia may be the key to solving the puzzle of just what the late Sandy Berger, acting as former President Bill Clinton’s representative, was destroying during his 2005 trips into the National Archives, where he stuffed papers into his clothing. Berger only got away with this twice before archive personnel kept tabs on him, but the first trips involved as yet uncatalogued material so no one really knows what he took. But there seemed to be copies in the archive of everything they caught him with. And archival libraries dependent upon physical papers are vulnerable.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Donald Trump is being selectively prosecuted.
Photo credit: David Samuel CC BY-SA 3.0 license
