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Zakaria: Everyone Has Classified Documents. The System Is out of Control.

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Some of the documents seized during a search by the FBI of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. (Department of Justice via AP)
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What should we think of the fact that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Mike Pence have all turned out to have classified material sitting in their houses?

Before I answer that question, let me tell you a few facts. One 2004 essay put the number of classified pages in existence at about 7.5 billion. In 2012, records were classified at a rate of 3 per second, making for an estimated 95 million classifications that year alone. Today, no one knows how frequently information is classified. And as of 2019, more than 4 million people were eligible to access classified information, about one-third for top secret records, the highest general designation.

The real scandal is that the U.S. government has a totally out-of-control system of secrets that represents a real danger to the quality of democratic government.

Read more from Fareed Zakaria at The Washington Post

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