If anyone is ultimately responsible for the embarrassing classified documents circus that has now drawn in the US president, it’s the late disgraced president Richard Nixon.
For two centuries, through the height of the second world and cold wars, the US had prospered perfectly well without the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
Presidents and vice-president, grown adults, patriots all, were trusted to make their own judgments about where documents should be kept.
But concern that the pardoned former president Nixon might destroy documents critical to posterity compelled the codification of who could keep what where when.
Now, 45 years later, two presidents are each ludicrously under investigation by the justice department for the victimless, alleged ‘crimes’ of keeping so-called ‘classified documents’.
Their discovery at Joe Biden’s Delaware home, only days after similar documents were found at his former office in Washington, is an unmitigated disaster for the president, who specifically told 60 Minutes late last year that Mr Trump was “irresponsible” for having mishandled such documents.
How can someone who, by implication, believes himself to be irresponsible hold the highest office in the land?
Indeed, Democrat congressman Hank Johnson on Thursday (Friday AEDT), after news of the second batch emerged, even reckoned they could have been “planted”, perhaps to frame the president, making it harder for him to run again for president, which until this week at least, was considered likely.
Unlike Trump, Biden immediately turned over all the documents to the National Archives immediately, rather than disputing his right to have them in the first place.
But this is a technicality most Americans will probably care little for, seeing instead rank hypocrisy, and a gross over-reaction by the justice department in sending police to raid a former president’s private home.
Even on the strict legal issues, Trump at least can argue he personally declassified the document he was keeping, a claim some lawyers believe has some weight.
Biden, a former vice-president, who presumably has had these documents at his home for more than five years, could not have.
The justice department may not emerge unscathed either. Biden’s documents were found in early November, before the midterm elections, yet the public weren’t informed.
Attorney-General Merrick Garland appointed a US attorney to investigate the discovery on 14th November, just four days before he appointed a special counsel to investigate Mr Trump.
The second appointment was made public, not the latter. Isn’t the department meant to be apolitical?
Perhaps, if the documents in question mattered, all the drama and cost might be worth it. But in truth most classified documents marked secret should be stamped boring.
In 2016 William Leonard, a former senior official at the US National Archives, said overclassification was rampant throughout the US government, as bureaucrats and politicians seek to flatter themselves by routinely overclassifying unimportant information.
Former CIA director under George W Bush, Michael Hayden, once pointed out he’d received a Merry Christmas email that was marked Top Secret.
In any case, the two men could simply have taken a photo of the documents on their iPhones, presumably getting around the obsolete law.
Republicans arguably started all this feigned outrage over mismanagement of classified documents when they tried to destroy Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server in 2016.
So it was only natural the Democrats would relish destroying Trump over the same issue.
Now it’s come back to bite the Democrats again, it should be clear these document management laws have simply become tools to destroy political enemies. Everyone loses, including the American people, who would prefer their representatives and media be talking about issues that actually matter.
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