The Biden White House is scrambling to conduct damage control as troves of classified materials about Russia and Ukraine were leaked online. Spokesperson John Kirby pleaded with the media not to cover these materials. That wasn’t heeded. But the overarching issue is mishandling classified materials and related leaks, which the liberal media tried to weaponize against Donald Trump when they raided Mar-a-Lago last summer. Then Joe Biden got caught leaving state secrets at multiple locations, including his Wilmington residence. The story met a quick death in the press and a slow-walking Department of Justice investigation that allegedly hung on the word of Biden’s personal attorneys. The endless cycle about classified materials, leaks, and their related dangers, all hyperbole, saturated the media to the point where we might have one that could impact national security, and no one cares (via The Guardian) [emphasis mine]:
The evidence emerging on the leak of classified US defence documents suggests that it was probably not some dastardly hacking or disinformation plot by Russia or the US, but rather another example of how carelessly Washington handles its secrets.
The least likely version of reality is the one being circulated among Kremlin supporters, that it was a clever piece of CIA distraction ultimately aimed at demoralising Russians by showing how many lives they had lost, and how badly their war was going in Ukraine.
The reference to Russian losses, however, was in just one of more than a hundred documents known to have been leaked, and the rest of the material is damaging either to Kyiv, by revealing Ukraine’s ammunition woes and some of its air defence deployments, or to the US, by exposing the depth of its involvement in Ukraine’s defence, some of its intelligence-collection methods on Russia – including details on little-known satellite technology – and the extent of Washington’s espionage directed at allies, such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel.
[…]
The truth may be more worrying for the US and its allies than a Russian hack. The Washington Post cited a defence official as saying that many of the documents appear to have been put together over the winter for Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, and other top military leaders, but they were available to other US personnel and contractors with the right security clearances.
According to the most recent figures published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, there were 1.25 million people with clearance and access to read top secret material in the US government in 2019. The figures have not been made public since then, but nothing suggests they have significantly diminished. The Pentagon has said it is reviewing its access policy.
Numbers that big make it almost a statistical certainty that, at some point, incredibly damaging top secret material will fall into the hands of someone willing to leak it, perhaps for ideological reasons, like Edward Snowden, in the case of his revelation of US mass surveillance.
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So, given the Left’s rules set post-Trump raid, will the FBI pay a visit to these 1.25 million people who have access to sensitive materials? Of course, that’s not going to happen, but it highlights once again how anything Trump-related is treated as an unprecedented event when it’s not. The Left’s myopia for most of their attacks on the former president has been nothing short of stunning, almost comical. The allegations of Trump mishandling classified materials were treated as an unprecedented event until Biden’s state secret snafu, which suddenly led to multiple stories about how everyone in DC leaked these documents since the Kennedy presidency. The number of times the liberal media has cried wolf has led to multiple flocks of sheep being slaughtered.
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