It is a scandal that has intermittently consumed the attention of the press, and I think of a lot of regular people too, because they immediately apprehend the meaning of words like “unlawfully possessed top secret documents.” But people don’t quite know what to make of it. Everything gets so politicized so fast.
You don’t know what level of alarm to feel about the security breaches because you don’t know the documents’ exact contents. Are we talking about a scribbled note on an old Group of 20 schedule, or are we talking about nuclear codes? Is it an amusingly phrased section from an old intelligence report saying the Danish foreign secretary’s husband is said to be romantically involved with a hairdresser whose social-media posts suggest neo-Nazi ties? Or is there a paper in there revealing the names of U.S. intelligence assets in Iran?
Because you don’t know the content, you can’t infer the motive. Why might a government official illegally bring home and keep classified documents? What did he intend to do with them? “I thought I’d need it for my memoirs.” “I must admit I thought it an unimportant document to anyone but me—it was inappropriately classified because the default mode of clerks is to say, ‘Classify it.’ So I harmlessly declassified.” Or, “Heck, there was no motive because there was no crime! In the last day at the White House my aides scooped the papers off the top of my desk, saw no markings, plopped them in a box with other papers, sent the box to my house where they put them in my basement, and we never knew there were any secret papers in there because we never opened the box!”
There could be other motives. Here’s one that’s too sweet, but early on it’s where my mind went. I thought of the psychology of it.
This may not sound true but I’ve seen it. People who were once in power—people who ran the world and then retired, or stepped down to do something else—as time passes and the years go on they can’t believe it happened to them. They can’t believe they had the pope on hold. They gesture to the silver framed picture on the table in the bedroom: “That’s us and the shah.” When they were running the world they took it in stride, but afterward they’re sort of concussed. And maybe they take something sensitive as a memento, as a souvenir of their greatness. I think they know they’re going to want to…
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