Back in the decade when I worked in the defense industry, my workmates had a running joke that most of the military secrets that we had in documents were either already reported in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science or had already been invented or reverse-engineered by our adversaries. And if neither of these were true, then it would be no more than a matter of months before one or more became true.
I suppose that the secrets that actually matter are those that reveal intelligence sources and methods. Perhaps documents that report the government’s covert actions and/or military plans are also worth keeping secret.
We don’t know the nature of the classified documents that Trump was hoarding. Nor do we know the nature of the classified documents found in the possession of Biden or Pence. All that we can say is that it is self-evident that document control practices in the Federal Government clearly suck. We can only hope that they are better at the NSA, CIA, and intelligence agencies.
Given the apparent widespread distribution of classified documents among former WH occupants and Congressional leaders, we should probably deploy teams of document cleaners to the residences of McCarthy and McConnell. You can never be too sure about these things. If the FBI were to find classified documents in the homes of either of them, it would put an end to the GOP’s false equivalencies concerning Trump and Biden’s possession of such paraphernalia.