Why Trump will be aquitted: He never had mandatory training to handle classified material
Lesson learned: The President, the Cabinet, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court justices must begin taking the same mandatory training that average government employees must take
Full Disclosure: This writer is not a fan of Donald Trump and never voted for him. Trump is a moral degenerate and was too old to be President even in 2020. That said, I’m not a fan of the equally troubling President Joe Biden. I am against Biden’s obvious political witch hunt of Trump even while his own deep corruption is increasingly exposed. Both these ignoble clowns have no business being President. Pending a Political Aptitude Test (PAT) for national office (including testing for deep knowledge of economics, business calculus, history, anthropology, etc.), such people will be barred from running for any national office in the future.
As we all know, the former President Donald Trump is being threatened with de facto life in prison for apparently taking some “top secret” classified documents before finally vacating the White House in 2021.
This seems a rather absurd, for a few reasons, but the most obvious to me as a former federal employee is that I’m about 99.99% sure that Trump never had to click through multiple, mandatory classified material handling courses which average federal employees who may handle such material must take ANNUALLY. This training is no joke. Completion of these courses is strictly monitored by leadership in every intelligence and information technology organization in the United States government. To not take and pass these courses is equivalent to not being qualified to properly handle and store classified documents—by definition. What’s more, the knowledge gained is considered perishable, so the same courses must be completed every year, like clockwork, before the start of the next fiscal year on October 1.
Curiously, I haven’t found any indication that Trump’s lawyers have stumbled upon this defense or been informed of it by one of tens of thousands of government employees that must take the training. I can tell you though, this is a slam-dunk defense that will lead to aquital. It’s as absurd to prosecute Trump on mishandling classified information as it would be to charge a company’s employee with causing an accident with a forklift despite the company knowingly hiring the untrained person to drive it without training. If anything, the company would be charged.
Here is a selection of classified materials handling training widely taken by government employees who may handle classified and/or privacy-related information:
Mandatory Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Training
Derivitive Classification Training
Classified Mailing Training
Records Management Annual Training
Information Security Program Training
Mandatory Annual Personnally Identifiable Information (PII) Training
Privacy Awareness Training
Cybersecurity Awareness Training (Information Awareness) Training
OPSEC (Operations Security) Level I Training
Annual Security Awareness Refresher Training
Level 1 Antiterrorism Awareness Training
Threat Awareness Reporting Program Training
Risk Management Training - Civilian
All the above courses are current for 2023 and almost all are annual regardless of whether it says so in the name. They each generally take from at least a half-hour to over two hours to complete. Most are conducted online through an interactive course, while some are “live” in an auditorium or online group session with an instructor.
Here are some of the many sites that provide classified information handling training to the federal government:
https://www.cdse.edu/Training/eLearning/IF141/
https://disa.mil/newsandevents/training
https://securityawareness.usalearning.gov/disclosure/index.html
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/mgmt-classified-national-security-program-implementation-directive.pdf
https://www.archives.gov/guidance/classified-info-guidance
In summary, the prosecution against Trump hasn’t a leg to stand on because the elitists in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. federal government have made sure they aren’t required to learn the importance and procedures for classified/privacy/cybersecure information handling. They de facto have made themselves above the laws required of the vast majority of government employees, despite being ostensibly those employees who need the training the most, who have the most exposure to the most information beyond a narrow “need to know” authorization held by typical government employees with a classified clearance, e.g., “top secret”. That is absurd and outrageous and needs to be fixed. Will the foxes lock themselves out of the hen house, or will their lack of training to be responsible be their permanent alibi? It’s up to the voters, apparently, to parent the politicasters into responsible legislators.
Government employees are expected not only to follow the law, but are trained to “avoid even the appearance of unethical behavior.” Clearly, that has never applied to the most elite government employees: Congress, the President and Cabinet, the Justices, and political appointees. It’s time to make it so.
Article on Congress's lack of training to handle classified documents (but no mention of how it acquits Trump of culpability for taking classified documents home):
https://www.foxnews.com/media/democrat-warns-congress-doesnt-totally-understand-handle-classified-documents-tip-iceberg