The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn't (merely) evidence of political impunity - it's also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.
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Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have "Top Secret clearance" and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.
Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we're scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless chambers of official secrecy:
Overclassification is a well-documented (ahem) problem, used by bureaucrats to cover up corruption, crimes and incompetence, as well as out of the lazy reflex to declare everything to be secret. This is abetted by members of the vast "Intelligence Community" who have rotated into the private sector and have a lucrative side-hustle as TV talking heads who spin spy-thriller fantasies about the risks of these paper broken arrows.
Dayen points to Senator Moynihan's 1997 report on "Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," and its conclusion that if you declare everything secret, then nothing ends up being truly secret. It's a brilliant, readable, devastating critique of official secrecy. Nothing has been done about its recommendations:
https://sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/
In 2016, the House Oversight Committee concluded that 90% of classified documents should not be classified, the same figure that the DoD came up with in its own report, 60 years earlier:
Meanwhile, the Information Security Oversight Office - which oversees classification - keeps ringing alarm bells about overclassification, with 50m+ documents being classified in a typical year. Rather than listen to the ISOO, Congress has cut its staff in half over the past decade. 620 ISOO employees oversee the three million Americans empowered to classify documents:
In 2010, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin took stock of the post-9/11 explosion in state secrets in their "Top Secret America" report: "No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
Attempts to liberate classified docs using FOIA requests fail repeatedly, with US agencies returning heavily redacted documents, even blacking out a report on the plans of the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge [to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of] Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."
As Dayen says, the talking point from ex-spooks on TV that "overclassification is no excuse for bad document handling," is the equivalent of the old saw that "mass shootings are not the time to talk about gun control." And yet, the press keeps buying it.
Take the Politico op-ed by an ex-FBI spook, who turned the fact that "a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario," proving that there is no overclassification excuse too absurd to get an airing:
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Kansas runs one of the most secretive state governments in the nation, and its secrecy permeates nearly every aspect of service, The Star found in a months-long investigation.
From the governor’s office to state agencies, from police departments to business relationships to health care, on the floors of the House and Senate, a veil has descended over the years and through administrations on both sides of the political aisle.
In the end, it's all about information and who owns it.
Governments take information very seriously, believe that even though we pay for it, they own it -- and therefore think it right and proper to keep it hidden from us.
Governments do that because they know that information truly is power. And if governments hold all the significant information, governments hold all the significant power.
In fact, governments take information so seriously that they only voluntarily release information that's inoffensively bland or makes them look good. The other stuff they label secret and hide it behind laws which make it a crime for anyone to divulge.
But there are more and more people around the world who think information gathered by our governments actually belongs to the people who pay for it. And that the people, therefore, are entitled to know what's going on in the corridors of power and, especially, what's being done in their name.
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Yesterday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit after the State Department failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the declassification of 23 State Department cables disclosed by WikiLeaks and widely disseminated online and in the press. The cables we seek reveal the diplomatic cost of policies that the Bush and Obama administrations have tried to keep secret from the American public.
Several of the cables describe high-level efforts by the government to pressure Spain and Germany into dropping investigations of the CIA's torture of detainees. The cables show that the U.S. expended significant diplomatic resources in order to try and guarantee impunity for officials responsible for the abduction and torture of victims including Khaled El-Masri, an entirely innocent German citizen. At home, the Bush and Obama administrations have invoked legal fictions such as the "state secrets" privilege to prevent U.S. courts from addressing cases of innocent people tortured and rendered by the CIA; these cables reveal the secret ways in which the government worked to defeat accountability abroad.
We believe the American people have a right to know about the government's efforts to shield from liability those officials who violated domestic and international law by engaging in abduction, rendition, and torture.
[...]
The ACLU's lawsuit comes on the anniversary of another famous leak. On Monday, June 13, 2011, the United States will release the declassified Pentagon Papers — 40 years after they were first leaked. The fact that for 40 years after their original release the government maintained the pretense that release of the Pentagon Papers would cause damage to U.S. national security shows just how divorced from reality the U.S. approach to secrecy has become. Americans should not have to wait 40 more years for the government to declassify vital information that the whole world is already discussing.
