Editor’s Note: Bradley P. Moss is a partner and national security attorney at the Washington, DC, Law Office of Mark S. Zaid, P.C. Follow him on Twitter at @BradMossEsq. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
CNN
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In the last two years, two men who previously served as constitutional officers of the executive branch have been informed that records marked classified from their time in office have been located in their private residences or offices. Those two men, of course, are former President Donald Trump, and current President (and former Vice President) Joe Biden.
To paraphrase Robert Frost, the roads these two men were on diverged in a wood, and Biden took the one the law requires you to travel on.
Unlike Trump, who spent nearly 18 months delaying, obfuscating and arguably obstructing efforts by the federal government to recover from Mar-a-Lago all of the documents with classification markings, Biden’s team appears to have played by the book.
According to media reports, in November 2022, Biden’s personal lawyers were clearing out remaining items at his private office at his pre-presidency think tank when they located approximately 10 documents containing classification markings. The lawyers appear to have notified White House counsel, who then notified the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The documents were properly secured by the federal government the next morning. Additional reporting indicates that a second separate batch of records with classification markings were found in supplemental searches by Biden aides.
To be unequivocally clear, those documents never should have been in unauthorized locations. Period. It is a serious breach of security protocol and a threat to national security any time any properly classified document is removed from authorized locations.
People can and have lost their security clearances and careers for breaches of these procedures. An investigation into how those documents came to be located at these private locations is currently being overseen by the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois, and I trust that office will have the full cooperation of the rest of the executive branch (including the White House) as required by law.
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