The Biden inquiry is a blessing for Trump and the Republicans. It enables them to assert that everyone engages in it and that if Trump is charged, he is the target of a political witch hunt. Jim Jordan, a Republican and leading House Judiciary Committee member, adopted a similar strategy. Jordan tweeted on Sunday, “Hillary Clinton mishandled secret documents. Joe Biden beat sensitive information. But President Trump is the only one whose house is searched, even though he did nothing wrong!
These initiatives to utilise the Biden issue as a shield against Trump has been rebuffed by liberal political observers. In a piece for The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus asserts that the Trump and Biden document situations seem less similar than different. Biden, in contrast, has cooperated with inquiries into his handling of the records. At the same time, Trump “was on frequent notice from the FBI that classified material was being sought [and] consistently failed to turn it over.
These are significant distinctions, but they also indicate that any case against Trump will be focused on obstruction of justice rather than the possession of top-secret documents. On that basis, the administration might prevail in court, but the political landscape has been clouded. The assertion that there is a double standard will carry some weight, especially given how well it fits Trump’s overall argument that he is an opponent of the Deep State and the establishment. Any obstruction of justice charges brought against someone for having access to secret information won’t harm Trump as leftists had hoped; on the contrary, they’ll fuel the MAGA faithful’s fervour.
Democrats would do well to consider why the handling of secret papers looms so large in recent political history rather than placing their hopes in the fool’s gold of legal prosecution of Trump on this topic.
The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a senator from New York at the time, gave the finest response to this query in his prophetic 1999 book Secrecy. The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, which he oversaw from 1995 to 1997, was the inspiration for the book. A culture of secrecy in the American government dates back to the First World War, and Moynihan demonstrates how it spread throughout the Cold War. Following that, when the Pentagon and intelligence agencies were supposed to cut back, the number of top-secret papers continued to grow. It is difficult to understand how fewer military officers and fewer classification authorities could lead to a stunning 62 percent increase in new secret documents—almost 6 million in total, and all of them deemed threats to national security if ever disclosed—when writing about the decade that followed the end of the Cold War, according to Moynihan. Such is the hold of bureaucracy and secrecy intertwined.
Because having the authority to classify secret papers as such is an exercise of power, the culture of secrecy grew and tightened its grip on the American government. Suppose bureaucratic warlords can declare specific data to be top secret and only accessible to a select group of people under particular conditions. In that case, they have the power to control policy, prevent public scrutiny, and punish whistleblowers.
Present problem
Departments and agencies stockpile information, and the government transform into a sort of market, according to Moynihan, who painted a vivid picture of the process that transforms secrets into power. Secrets turn into organisational assets that can only be traded for the help of another organisation. Sometimes the trade is direct: I give you my secret in exchange for your secret. The transaction can occasionally resemble barter: I offer my willingness to divulge certain secrets in exchange for your assistance in helping me achieve my goals. But regardless of the denomination, system expenses might be very high.
The remote system encouraged tremendous power abuse by authoritarian personalities like J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. This secrecy culture also fueled McCarthyism and Cold War extremism’s paranoia. The threat of inflation propelled the US into Vietnam, and other colonial ventures were founded on this. Due to their assumption that the government must have hidden explanations for the Vietnam War that were not open to public scrutiny, many members of the public were slow to voice their opposition.
The United States administration for decades greatly overestimated the Soviet danger due to the same culture of secrecy, focusing on secret papers of purported high importance while ignoring sufficient public proof of the Soviet Union’s severe economic limitations.
Why was the American intelligence community, which receives annual funding in the tens of billions of dollars, so caught off guard by the swift demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991? “The answer has to be, at least in part, that too much of the material was private, not sufficiently exposed to review by those outside government,” writes Moynihan. Too much focus was placed on information hoarding, defending boundaries, protecting budgets, and other business survival issues inside the intelligence community. Foreign and internal ethnic concerns received far too little attention. After all, the Soviet Union disintegrated along ethnic lines. Both domestically and internationally, the demise of Marxist-Leninist ideology received far too little attention. Contrary to what many believe, the Red Scare wasn’t as terrifying.
Moynihan expressed one of the broadest criticisms of the American government ever voiced by an elected person. He called for the minimal demolition of the bureaucratic system of secrecy as he concluded his book. While some of his suggestions for quicker declassification were implemented, the culture of classification as a whole only expanded following the publication of his study and book. The intelligence breakdown before the 9/11 terrorist assault was probably caused by the FBI and CIA keeping information from one another secret.
Other analysts have frequently reiterated Moynihan’s views over the 20 years since he published his book. They have been neglected, just like Moynihan.
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David Rothkopf has assembled a helpful mini-anthology of these laments in an article for the Daily Beast. For instance, Ronan Farrow noted in 2013 that “Trillions of new pages of text are classified each year” in The Guardian. A security clearance is now held by more than 4.8 million people, including low-level contractors like Edward Snowden. The Public Interest Declassification Board, a group created by Congress, issued a warning in December that widespread over-classification “impede[s] informed government decisions and an educated public” and, worse, “enable[s] corruption and wrongdoing.”
When many political leaders and bureaucrats work at least some of the time from home, they may likely trip over security standards. The Biden scandal “hit home” with government officials, according to Rothkopf, “because the United States government is awash in literally trillions of pages of classified documents, and the proper handling of those documents is a challenge for everyone who uses them as part of their daily government work.” In my 30 years in Washington, I’ve talked to several officials who unintentionally brought sensitive information home, maybe hidden in a seemingly benign stack of papers or file folder. Because the consequences are so grave, the reaction is frequently intense anxiety that borders panic.
Instead of debating which of Biden or Trump is worse, we have the chance to finally realise Moynihan’s goal of eliminating the classificatory bureaucracy. Astute senators will discover strong justifications to end the secrecy wars if they re-read Moynihan’s book. Why not weaken the bureaucracy that obtains control by withholding facts from the public rather than bringing charges against either Biden or Trump?
