Daily Herald opinion: Biden, Trump cases raise concerns about all handling of sensitive documents

This editorial represents the consensus opinion of the Daily Herald Editorial Board

If Congress really needs something to investigate, perhaps an urgent place to start would be to look into the rules for handling and managing classified documents.

Papers found in former President Donald Trump's possession at Mar-a-Lago and at the home and offices of President Joe Biden are the source of legitimate public distress as well as legal review, and the final analyses of the specific cases will be determined, properly, by the justice system and at the ballot box. Yet, while there are substantial differences between the circumstances involving the two cases, there is one alarming similarity. Elected officials or their staffs seem to take a surprisingly cavalier approach to the handling of some documents presumed to be among the most sensitive related to national security or government policy.

When his breach was discovered, Trump was criticized for shrugging off the seriousness of the issue with a complaint suggesting, in essence, "everybody does it." The discoveries of documents in Biden's possession certainly do nothing to contradict that claim. Indeed, they leave us naturally to wonder what other classified materials may be lying around in store rooms and vaults of former officials.

Obama? Bush? Cheney? Gore? Clinton? What about their CIA and FBI appointees? Former secretaries of state? How about congressional officials who may be privy to certain meetings or documents?

Can we be confident that papers these former administrations handled haven't simply been tossed somewhere where they could fall into hands that could damage our national security or compromise serious government projects?

Unlike Trump, Biden at least acknowledges that the issue is serious and his team appears to be cooperating fully to correct the blunder. But when asked this week about the discovery in November of documents from his years as vice president at the Penn Biden Center, the president's response was not significantly more comforting than the reactions of his predecessor to the Mar-a-Lago finds. The president said he was "surprised."

One has to ask, how can a person be "surprised" that documents presumably critical to national security were in his possession? Was he aware they had ever been there? Did he think someone had returned them? Did he forget he had them?

These are most uncomfortable questions, not just because of their political implications but because of what they now seem to imply about anyone who has ever had access to such information.

It's worth acknowledging that almost as soon as the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago had ended, some security experts were suggesting that government agencies may be too quick to protect some documents and that the standards for classifying them should be reviewed. That may be, but it appears inarguable that revisions are needed to policies on chain of possession.

Legal authorities will determine what culpability Trump or Biden may have under the law regarding the papers found in their possession, and the issues will surely play out in the political arena. But the larger question remains whether these are isolated situations or evidence of a broader problem with the care and handling of sensitive material.

That is a question worth bipartisan scrutiny in Congress and in any agency that maintains such documents.