The presidential mislaying of classified documents is infectious

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.

Although the recent discovery of classified papers in Joe Biden’s office and home probably has less sinister motives, it is embarrassing because he had recently berated his predecessor for doing something similar. The headlines got worse when the president sought to reassure the public by mentioning that he stored his Corvette in the same locked garage as the documents. It did not take long for pundits to contrast the fbi raid on Mr Trump’s home with spoof images of Mr Biden driving a sports car with documents flying out of the back.