XPost: alt.security.espionage, law.court.federal, talk.politics.guns
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics
From: johan@eweka.nl
The discovery of Obama-era classified papers in multiple locations former
Vice President Joe Biden used is the White House’s latest fiasco. “How
could that possibly happen? How could anyone be that irresponsible?” Biden
declared. Except that was him bemoaning to “60 Minutes” after the FBI
found classified documents in its raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume both Biden and Trump are guilty as hell
of mishandling classified documents. (Throw in Hillary Clinton for a
trifecta.) The current and former president deserve the full penalty of
law that they approved for other violators (some of whom have recently
been sent to federal prison for mishandling documents).
But the latest scandal shows the need to puncture the iron curtain that
both Republicans and Democrats dropped over the federal government.
Since the 1990s, the number of documents federal agencies classify
annually has increased 15-fold and now exceeds a trillion pages a year. In
2004, Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) derided the federal classification system
as “incomprehensibly complex” and “so bloated it often does not
distinguish between the critically important and the comically
irrelevant.” The New York Times reported in 2005 that federal agencies
were “classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new
categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like ‘sensitive security
information.’” It’s gotten worse since then.
Politicians are far more prone to condemn whistleblowers than to oppose
secrecy-shrouding federal abuses. Consider the reaction in 2013 after
Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s surveillance crime
spree, which included targeting Americans “searching the web for
suspicious stuff.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) responded,
“You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is
violated.” In the same way, congressmen presume that secrecy does no harm
as long as federal dirt never leaks out.
Except when politicians or other officials profit from shoveling dirt. The
combination of pervasive secrecy and selective disclosure empowers
Washington insiders to spur one media stampede after another.
Trump’s presidency was crippled by leaks of classified, often false or
misleading, material on RussiaGate. After a two-year investigation (and
more leaks), special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence to prosecute
Trump or his campaign officials for colluding with Russia in the 2016
campaign. But the RussiaGate controversy helped the Democrats capture
control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 election.
In 2019, a leak of the transcript of a phone call between Trump and
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky led to Trump’s first impeachment.
In 2020, Biden won the presidency in part because federal agencies
suppressed troves of potentially damning documents on his or his son’s
dealings in Ukraine and other foreign nations. The FBI confirmed that
Hunter Biden’s laptop was bona fide but aided other federal agencies and
officials who discredited its revelations of Biden family corruption just
before Election Day.
Even some Biden appointees claim to recognize the perils of the
classification system. According to Politico, the Biden White House is
launching a “new war on secrecy” and is especially concerned about
“potentially illegal [government] activities that have been shielded from
the public for decades.” (Be still my beating heart.)
A Biden administration official, speaking anonymously, declared it is in
the “nation’s best interest to be as transparent as possible with the
American public.” (Explicitly attaching one’s name to that seditious
notion could ruin one’s DC career.)
Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, told Congress
last year that “deficiencies in the current classification system
undermine our national security . . . by impeding our ability to share
information in a timely manner” among government policymakers.
“We spend $18 billion protecting the classification system and only about
$102 million . . . on declassification efforts,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-
Mass.) groused last year. “That ratio feels off in a democracy.” But
inside the Beltway, rigging the game 176 to 1 is “close enough for
government work” for transparency.
Washington’s prevailing political culture remains hell-bent against
candor. Republicans in the House of Representatives voted Tuesday to
create the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal
Government to expose, among other things, government crimes that have been
kept secret. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn), the top House Democrat,
denounced the effort Wednesday as a “Select Committee on Insurrection
Protection” and promised to “fight it tooth and nail.”
Will Democrats stretch their ever-growing definition of treason to include
“disclosing derelictions and debacles conniving bureaucrats prefer to
hide”? Perhaps Biden’s congressional allies recognize that perpetuating
coverups is the only way Biden will get re-elected.
Pervasive secrecy defines down democracy: People merely select their
Supreme Deceivers. The legal fate of Biden and Trump is less important
than whether Americans will finally learn how the feds are abusing their
power. But it remains to be seen if the odds that “truth will out” are
better than 176 to 1.
James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board
of Contributors.
Comments:
Dennis Lee
6 hours ago
Biden as VP had no authority to determine classification or declassify.
This is a serious national security issue and needs to be prosecuted to
the fullest.
Augustus
5 hours ago
I want to hold Biden to the same standard of justice that he wants Trump
held to. He's been playing the corrupt game for forty years and it needs
to stop.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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