Elite impunity, the power of permanent government, the people lose

On Biden and Trump's classified documents

Joe Biden’s classified documents are of course being treated differently than Donald Trump’s. Somehow we are to excuse Biden for misplacing his Top Secrets, or even better, to just blame his staff and let Joe off the hook altogether. Trump, on the other hand, is labeled a criminal or even some spy. That’s what they say. They is the key word here – the permanent state that thinks they are just adhering to the law and protecting national security without any political overtones or public impact.

Meanwhile, the news media and social media argue about the degree of damage or what each man’s intentions were, missing that out of all of this the power of the permanent government grows. They would like you to walk away believing they are the keepers of national security, and they adjudicate the behavior of the highest elected officials, that they have the right (and the duty) to do so, that they are above it all. And to take it one step further, they want you to accept that they are producing all of this “intelligence” but that it needs to stay behind some locked door and it is for their own use. The elected decision-makers? They can’t be trusted, and they are a mere annoyance. The workers? They can’t be trusted and need to have their lives on permanent monitoring.

To the Edward Snowdens of the world, the injustice here is that neither Biden nor Trump are going to jail, and nor did David Petraeus or Gen. Cartwright or other bigwigs, and on and on. (Of course, Edward Snowden didn’t go to jail, he just moved there.) But the Reality Winner’s or Chelsea Manning’s did go to jail. It is unfair not because Biden and Trump should go to jail but more that the workers shouldn’t have, at least not for breaking the law as it relates to “classified” documents and national security. Even in the case of Edward Snowden, who stole hundreds of thousands of classified documents, no actual harm to the national security has been shown. Yes he violated his oath and is guilty of administrative infractions, but almost a decade later, one has to frankly conclude that the NSA was inconvenienced. Snowden didn’t damage it and the end result is … they have more power.

The news flash is that the elite are treated differently than the workers. Which both shouldn’t surprise anyone. But the true problem here is that there is a more powerful entity, an officious and bureaucratic machine with its own jargon and standards that holds itself higher than both, the elite and the workers. Some might say that that’s what you get in a society that lives by the rule of law. I say that’s not true, that everything about “classified” (that is, controlled) information is subjective. We never get to the question of whether something should be classified, nor what the people have a right to know, what they should know.  

In the case of Biden’s classified documents, I’m deliberately mixing Biden and Trump because both were subject to search warrants in which the government had to show a judge that there was a crime involved. In other words, Biden and Trump are exactly the same in the eyes of the law (in the eyes of the FBI). When the wand of national security is waived, we tend to forget that the laws that they are suspected of violating are administrative in nature, whether that be relating to presidential papers or to espionage (which includes rules on possession that are completely different with regard to whether one distributed classified documents or not). Liberals will scream that Donald Trump “obstructed” the law but that again just skirts the finer point. It’s more that he went against the rules – their rules – and didn’t accept subservience to Washington’s officious ways, which is exactly why he is so popular with so many.

One can rhetorically argue that secrecy has truly run amok, but that was said and written as much about in the 1960s and 1980s. Yes secrecy progressively gets worse, especially after some disaster like 9/11 or while we’re waging perpetual war (which is always). It is all meant to deny information to the “enemy” or thwart ever more sophisticated spying by our adversaries, and indeed that happens. But the effect of more secrecy, and the advances being made in keeping secrets secret have the effect of placing them above elected officials and better able to control. In that way, when the permanent government spectacularly fails – such as in preventing 9/11 or January 6th, or losing in Afghanistan and Iraq, or creating ISIS in fighting al Qaeda – all we can do is timidly talk about reform and relief for the losers. The retired generals and the former intelligence community big-wigs, themselves the architects of this mess, then tell us what to think and how “it” should work. The permanent government slinks away. The people are not only less informed but also blamed for not supporting national security enough.

The rules that exist regarding secrecy (“classified documents”) need to be completely overhauled. The very notion of what damages our national security should be questioned and debated. As you think about Biden’s classified documents, remember the word “our.”  It’s our national security. Not theirs. And as elected officials, we are endowing the President with power over the executive branch, not to be subordinate to them. As such Donald Trump isn’t wrong in saying he declassified the documents or even thought them into being declassified. That’s his fundamental power that he is granted as the elected supreme. For the Washington weanies, they don’t particularly have a counter-argument: It’s just that they want there to be a form (their form) for the President to fill out for this to be so.

I heard some very learned law professor bonehead on the radio talking about Biden’s violation, saying that what was now needed was “transparence” – finding out who visited Biden’s home or who might have had access to the documents. Donald Trump, on the other hand, he said, hid the documents and refused to return them even when the government asked for them repeatedly. That was the law professor’s version of the difference between the two. We need transparency, he said, so that … well what, I thought? So that the FBI can investigate every person who had access? So that they can be added to some list?  So that the FBI could put a black mark in their files? Search their homes? Has that been the outcome of the investigations into Trump?

The nice NPR interviewer didn’t follow up with what difference (to the NATIONAL SECURITY) it would make if the saintly Biden was transparent. If he were asked, the law professor would undoutedly say that transparency is important in learning what went wrong and ‘how to make better rules.’ In other words, to make Biden’s scandal go away, to undermine the news media, and to calm the people. While leaving behind the aura that Trump is a criminal, that is, the man who challenged them had to be (and has to be) expunged.

The winner in all of this is the permanent government: the FBI, the intelligence community, the Justice Department. They grow in power, believing more and more that they rightly decide what is national security and who should be punished for damaging it. In reality though, it’s really about those who violate their rules. How that affects everyday life is in the effect on public opinion over something that they think is purely nonpartisan and administrative. After reporting intensely on Mar-a-Lago, FBI and Justice Department officials dismissed any kind of notion about the timing of the Trump raid had any political content whatsoever. And yet whatever you think about Trump or Mar-a-Lago, it affected public opinion and behavior. I am not making a partisan argument. But we should at this point remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t guilty of anything. He is presumed innocent and still has not been charged with any crime for the papers recovered. Just like Joe Biden.

People who don’t understand government or understand that the FBI now think that the Biden discovery happened as a signal by conspirators for Joe not to run in 2024. Similarly, some believe that Mar-a-Lago was timed to undermine Trump and the Republican in the mid-terms and overall. I don’t believe in such intent even if timing is a bitch. And yet factually, Biden’s classified documents were handed over to the National Archives on November 3rd, just days before the mid-term elections and yet we didn’t hear about it for another couple of months. Did some dastardly person in the White House intentionally do that? I think the answer is an absolute no. But the more investigations and hearings that take place to find out obscures that all that will happen is that their power grows. Transparency only applies to the elected and not to them.

On January 19, Biden gave one of his fake folksy ‘there is no there there’ when he was forced to speak about the documents. “We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said. Filed in the wrong place, just as was the case for Donald Trump. Yes, the former President said that the documents had been declassified by him (not an impossibility), but they were retrieved to comply with a Records Act. In the end, they had nothing to do with national security. Just as one could argue that Snowden and Manning’s had little to do with national security either.