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As more questions arise from the discoveries of government documents found in President Joe Biden’s offices and home, elected officials and government watchdog groups are expressing concerns about the security of important documents.
The latest news comes months after it was revealed that former President Donald Trump had several boxes of top-secret government documents at his Mar-a-Lago ranch last summer.
John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, spoke with «Start Here» Monday about the probe and how government documents are handled.
START HERE: John, I should point out you were acting under President Biden, you resigned last spring when Biden’s full-time pick was about to be confirmed…but you know this space very well. How do documents like this just keep popping up?
JOHN COHEN: I worked in the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and, as you pointed out, the Biden administration, and I had security clearances. I had broad access to classified information. In fact, during some of that time, I also was in charge of offices that conducted security investigations or worked to safeguard classified information. And unless you are working in an organization like the CIA or another intelligence community organization, where all you’re working with is classified information, and these types of security violations are not really that uncommon when you are working with large quantities of documents and you are co-mingling classified reports with unclassified documents. It is not uncommon for there to be situations where, inadvertently, people will mix them together and walk out of a SCIF or secured facility with a document they shouldn’t have. And when that happens, there is a very well-established process known as a security investigation.
And with a security investigation, we’ll look at real quickly: How sensitive were the documents? Were they clearly marked? How were they mishandled? Meaning, was it an accident or was it inadvertently inadvertent or was it intentional if it was intentional? The investigation will then try to determine was that intentional mishandling for nefarious purposes. We’ve had situations where people remove classified information because they were writing a book. In other cases, people remove classified information because they intend to give it to a foreign adversary. The latter obviously being much more serious. So all of that is pretty customary when looking at a security violation or an instance where there’s been mishandling of classified information.
START HERE: Well, customary seems like the weird word, though. You mentioned a SCIF, which are these like secure locations. So are those documents always supposed to be viewed in those secure locations, or is it allowable for a public official to take those home, maybe to an unsecured house or a garage or whatever and look them over there? What are the protocols with the classified stuff specifically?
COHEN: The short answer is, it depends.
