President Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump are just the latest in a four-decade-long chain of recent presidents who have mishandled classified documents during their tenure, according to National Archives and Records Administration officials.
In a closed-door hearing in March, National Archives representatives told a congressional committee that every administration since President Reagan has in some form fumbled federal procedure when managing top-secret records.
“I will tell you that — so every PRA administration from Reagan forward we have found classified information in unclassified boxes,” William Bosanko, the chief operating officer of the National Archives said, according to a transcript of the testimony released Wednesday.
Federal law bars the removal of classified documents to unauthorized locations, but Bosanko said that “document-level tracking in the executive branch in the White House Complex” does not exist.
Records become easily lost or mingled with non-classified documents because the White House treats various offices as “open storage” to which multiple individuals have access and the ability to move papers in and out, the COO said.
The mayhem — combined with the modern ability to print confidential documents being sent by email — allows papers to become easily lost within a president’s home, as exemplified by Biden and Trump within the past year.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating how White House documents wound up in Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home and at his Washington, DC-based office, where he worked from 2017 until he launched his presidential campaign in 2019.
Last year, Trump was caught with 15 boxes worth of classified information stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The FBI then seized several sets of documents — some of which were marked as highly classified — during an August raid.
Presidents are not the only federal officials guilty of taking home secret papers.
“Since about 2010, we have gotten over 80 calls from different libraries where mostly Members of Congress have taken papers and deposited them in libraries for collections, their own papers,” Mark Bradley, who directs the agency’s Information Security Oversight Office, said.
For example, Bradley said, former Democrat Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie was found with 98 classified documents when he tried to give his papers over to the library at Bates College after retiring from his 21-year tenure.
The National Archives are alerted to government-owned property, such as classified documents, in the personal possession of a politician, the agency sends a team of officials to retrieve the papers and bring them back to Washington, Bradley said.
In a statement, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said that “the handling and mishandling of classified documents are a problem that stretches beyond the Oval Office.”
“We need a better way for elected officials who are leaving office — in both the Executive Branch and Legislative Branch — to properly return classified material and protect the integrity of our national security,” Turner said.