Documents

The rules about dealing with classified government documents is in the news and some what confusing. We are told that all presidents take home classified materials but are suppose to later return them. Some did and some didn't. Let's assume that outgoing President Smith wants to pad his retirement fund so he selects some juicy stuff about a dozen countries with the plan to later sell this information. But he is no fool so he gets all his documents at home and then transfers them to a thumb drive and returns all the originals. Maybe he just has a small amount of critical information so he just commits that to memory. To further add to the confusion former President Clinton took home information on tape and kept it. A group brought a law suit against Clinton to retrieve the tapes but the court said that the tapes were Clinton's personal records and he could keep them. But in a 2012 opinion, the trial judge overseeing Judicial Watch’s lawsuit ruled that even if the tapes should have been designated to be presidential records, she could not order the National Archives to recategorize them. It appears that some refinement in the rules is needed