The presidential mislaying of classified documents is infectious

Another president, another special counsel

US President Joe Biden speaks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023. US inflation continued to slow in December, adding to evidence price pressures have peaked and putting the Federal Reserve on track to again slow the pace of interest-rate hikes. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images — Image: Getty Images

Jan 13th 2023|Washington, DC

PRESIDENTS HAVE mishandled official documents since long before Donald Trump was flushing them down White House toilets and hoarding others at Mar-a-Lago. Several took files (mostly non-classified) with them when they left the White House, says Jeremi Suri, at the University of Texas at Austin, as keepsakes or for their memoirs. Occasionally, as with Lyndon Johnson’s obfuscation of classified Vietnam papers, they did so to keep unflattering information out of the public eye. The most infamous example, at least until the Trump saga, was the wiping of White House recordings in 1973, during the Watergate investigations into Richard Nixon.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Sloppy Joe”