The Truth About Those ‘Classified’ Biden and Trump Docs
NSA expert and writer Kerry Howley on what classified docs really mean—the bad and not-so-bad but still bad. Plus! The story of whistleblower ‘Reality Winner’ will infuriate you.
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Reuters and National Archives
The right and the left seemed to have gotten super worked up about the classified documents found in the private homes of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, but NSA and surveillance writer Kerry Howley, also the author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, saw the findings differently.
“Everything is classified. It is the default for anything the NSA, or CIA, does to be classified. And that includes maybe your writing an email to your wife about lunch, right? If you don't classify it, you're calling attention to it, right? So you just classify it,” she explains on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast.
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“So there's mountains and mountains of absolutely meaningless classified data. It doesn't tell you anything. The fact that there were some papers in Biden's garage that were classified just tells you that there are papers in Biden's garage, right? Like you need to know more of the story.”
She tells co-host Andy Levy that the same is true for Trump, adding that “the Trump situation is actually interesting in that he wanted those documents because they had that aura of mystery that we give them."
However, having lots of classified documents, and surveillance data on Americans, to sift through isn’t a good thing for us, and Howley explains why. It's actually scary.
Plus! She shares with Andy what whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have in common and tells him more about the whistleblower “Reality Winner,” a woman not a horse, whose story will infuriate you.
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