Here is a fun little tip for anyone working in government who needs to destroy sensitive documents: you actually have to destroy them. You cannot just put them in a bag that says "burn" on it and then walk away like you just completed a crossword puzzle. And yet, as reported by Trending Views, that appears to be exactly what happened at an FBI building where federal officials discovered a significant number of burn bags stuffed with Obama administration documents that were marked for destruction but never actually incinerated.
President Trump dropped this little nugget during his Thursday night primetime address on election security. "Maybe we got lucky," Trump said. If those bags contain what some suspect they might, "lucky" could be the understatement of the decade, possibly the century, depending on how spicy the contents turn out to be.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, burn bags are a standard federal tool for collecting classified or sensitive materials that need to be permanently eliminated. They are not meant to be storage containers. The whole point is the burning part. Finding them unburned and sitting around in a federal building full of documents from a prior administration is roughly as normal as finding a parachute that was never deployed still sitting in the airplane.
Trump has directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA to review the contents. They are examining what the documents say, whether any laws were broken in how they were handled, and what the chain of custody looked like from the moment they were packaged to the moment someone stumbled upon them.
Critics have already started running their standard playbook: finding unburned documents does not prove a crime, and criminal charges require evidence of knowing violations of federal law. That is technically accurate. It also completely sidesteps the rather obvious question of what someone inside the federal government wanted permanently erased before the new administration took office on January 20, 2017.
The broader context from Trump's address makes this discovery even more interesting. He also revealed that CIA analysts allegedly softened their assessments of Chinese election interference. FBI officials reportedly described operating a "shadow government" designed to keep election intelligence away from the White House. NSA members allegedly altered Presidential Daily Briefings to conceal findings that China was actively working to defeat the sitting president. All of this reportedly occurred during the Obama-Biden transition period and the early months of the first Trump administration.
So to recap: alleged intelligence manipulation, an alleged shadow government, and now a pile of bags full of documents that someone ordered destroyed but never bothered to actually light on fire. Whoever was in charge of the shredding operation really dropped the ball on the most critical step of the entire process.
Investigators have begun their review, and the contents of those bags will either confirm or complicate the picture being assembled. One detail worth noting is that critics have already begun running messaging against documents that none of them have actually seen yet. Which is a bold strategy when you think about it. Defending against evidence you have not read is a lot like objecting to a movie you have not watched. It does not exactly radiate confidence.
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