John Stossel: Government’s Dirty Secret

Donald Trump’s house contains classified documents!

Democrats were horrified! Trump is guilty “mishandling of some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets” Create “a national security crisis!” Nicole Wallace and Chris Hayes of MSNBC.

Next, President Joe Biden was caught.

The conservatives were suddenly upset.

“Thanks to Joe Biden,” Sean Hannity “America’s most sensitive secrets were floating around.”

Both sides were wrong.

The truth is that the word “truth” means: “classified” means little. Three things are now classified every second by our bloated government.

The stacks of classified paper in Washington would be higher than 26 Washington Monuments if they were stacked together.

Matthew Connelly is the author of “The Declassification Engine,” This is how it works. “as much as bureaucrats know they’re only supposed to classify information that’s really important, they end up classifying all kinds of nonsense. … Even like telling a friend, ‘Let’s go have coffee.’ They’ll end up classifying that email as top-secret.”

Mike Hayden, former director of the CIA received a classified message saying that “Merry Christmas.”

Government kept track for many years of the amount of peanut butter that the Army purchased. They also classified the description of Dagestan’s wedding rituals. They also classify newspaper article.

They are particularly eager to categorize dumb things they do, such as the Army’s reported experiments testing whether “psychics” Could kill people with their eyes.

“A lot of what the government keeps secret, they keep secret simply because it’s embarrassing,” Connelly.

Sometimes, the government will try to reduce overclassification.

The excess was pledged by Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton.

“Not in one case did they actually reduce the rate at which our government was creating secrets,” Connelly. “In fact, the amount of secrecy only increased.”

This is not surprising to me. Government is more about status and butt-covering than efficiency.

Connelly, “I would imagine bureaucrats think, ‘Ooh, if I label this classified, I’m more important.'”

“In Washington,” He answers. “many officials won’t even look at something unless it’s classified.”

There is no disadvantage to wasting your time classifying things.

“In all my years of research,” Connelly says, “I’ve never found a single instance of anybody being fired for overclassifying something.”

There is so much that is not important but “classified” It’s not surprising that paper ends up in the homes of officials.

After Trump was caught along with Biden, classified documents were found at Mike Pence’s home. Hillary Clinton was convicted of sending classified information to her email address in 2014. David Petraeus, an ex-CIA Director, sent classified papers to his mistress as part of a book she was working on.

Connelly is offended that these people treat government documents like their private property. Biden’s documents could be found in a folder labelled “Biden”. “personal.”

“I’d like to know who thought that this was his personal property?” Connelly: “These are our property. These records are our history.”

People who take records home to their homes go to prison. A Navy veteran who kept top-secret documents at home was sentenced to three years imprisonment. A former contractor of the CIA was sentenced for keeping classified documents in his house.

That won’t happen to Trump or Biden, I bet.

America’s first “top-secret” D-Day was the landing. Because Hitler did not know exactly where the troops would land, D-Day was successful.

The second was an atomic bomb.

“We have to keep secrets,” Connelly. “But when we create tens of millions of new secrets every year, it’s impossible to identify and protect the things that really do have to be protected.”

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