World
“Even I handled classified documents better”—Snowden on the Biden scandal
The White House was criticised by the NSA whistleblower for finding secret documents.
After a second set of secret documents related to US Vice President Joe Biden were found, this time in his Delaware garage, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said that he used to keep this kind of information in a more secure way.
Wow, I managed to handle classified documents with more security. At least I encrypted them! On Thursday, Snowden tweeted a link to a New York Times article regarding the latest Biden discoveries.
The former contractor for the CIA and NSA was making reference to his 2013 decision to expose the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of Americans. The US government retaliated by accusing him of stealing government property and leaking sensitive information, among other things. After Washington also took away Snowden’s passport, he was left in Russia, where he eventually got political asylum.
Later on Thursday, in response to a statement made by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre that the Biden documents had been “inadvertently misplaced,” Snowden made the remark, “Man, I should have thought of that one.”
The records originate from Joe Biden’s time serving as Vice President under Barack Obama. On November 2, the University of Pennsylvania discovered the first batch, but it wasn’t until this week that the discovery was made public.
The US Department of Justice “found out about it a week prior to the midterm elections and chose to suppress the information, conferring a partisan advantage,” according to Snowden, who first described the delay as the true scandal.
Also, he shared a commenter’s claim that no US politician really cares about sensitive documents and that “the fake outrage about it is only used to punish political opponents.”
Back in August, after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Biden and other Democrats were angry that the former president might have kept some secret information there.
Unlike Biden, Trump had the power to declassify papers while he was president. The inquiry into how Biden handled the sensitive documents has now been given to a special counsel by the DOJ. However, several Republicans have expressed concern that the action is meant to hinder their inquiry into the Biden White House.
