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Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan
My husband was USMC in the early 90s with TS and TS/SCI clearance, and he's pretty outraged about the cavalier attitude about this shit from people who should fucking know better. He says he would have been locked up for taking a single page from a CONFIDENTIAL (lowest level) folder home. Almost 30 years later, he still won't talk about any of the stuff he saw because he takes it that seriously. And they monitored the hell out of people who had the clearance/access. He said he got a talking to because he was late for a car payment. They absolutely do not want anyone to have anything on you, if you have access to that kind of information. Tracks with what Wanda Sykes said about working for the NSA. I imagine a lot of folks who had/have that kind of access are pretty fucking pissed right now.
I'm a HIPAA privacy officer who also handles subpoenas and open records requests. With the reports on how the White House used to handle sensitive information last week, and Alex Jones's lawyer's fuck up the week before, I've broken out in hives. I, too, have sent law enforcement to the homes of former employees to retrieve sensitive information after repeated attempts to get the info less aggressively have failed. I usually just want the info back, but then I don't have authority to do much else if they no longer work for us.
I think anyone who has ever signed an NDA with Trump should be allowed to handle the information on Trumpworld as well as they handled classified US information. |
We'll never know why Trump took those records. People like to assume nefarious goals, but it's just as likely incompetence, arrogance (they're mine), and paranoia (they're confidential to me and my team alone), or all four combined.
We've all dealt with people accused of civil fraud who seem to make a habit of it and often succeed in it. They seem to simply ignore rules. I'm not talking about willful ignorance. I'm talking about ignorance as policy - simply not observing rules unless they're thrust upon one.
It's impossible to pin fraud on these people because they honestly don't know wtf they're doing. They just don't care. They seem to follow a policy of "I'll do what I want unless and until stopped from doing so." Sure, they follow the big rules we all know one can't violate (outright, obvious crimes), but they never look at the fine print rules. So any accusation involving intent becomes nearly impossible to prove. (One always winds up settling for a negligent misrepresentation claim instead of fraud when suing them.)
I don't think Trump would know or give a fuck about document handling rules if his life depended on it. That shit's beneath him, work for the eggheads. Except he had no eggheads. He had sycophants. And this allows him a second level of defense - in addition to lack of intent, the argument somebody else was responsible. (He's going to use this one on Giuliani in GA soon, I think.)
He's so sheltered, so clueless, and so unaware of anything beyond the immediate that I believe him when he says he thought he could declassify the docs and walk off with them. In his ADD addled pea brain he probably figured, in Nixonian fashion, when the President says its declassified, it's declassified.
God only knows how many people he showed the allegedly sensitive stuff he held on heads of state. "Vinnie, look, I'm not paying you the $500 for losing that match because I quit on hole 17 to take a phone call. I'm POTUS... I can do that. But come in my office and check out these photos of Macron with the housekeeper. And you really gotta see these crazy nukes Kim Jong Un has been building."
