Part 1: https://en.neritam.com/2025/07/05/deeper-problems-with-overclassification-of-govt-docs/
Jeremy, it’s great to have you with us today from Zagreb, Croatia. I wanted to ask you — in Part 1 of our conversation, you talked about the documents that the Justice Department, the FBI has found in Biden’s garage and in the Biden Penn Center, etc., as well as, you know, the documents Trump took. But can you talk about, overall, in Part 2 of this conversation, about the issue of classification?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. Well, you know, Joe Biden, who has been in public office for almost the entirety of his adult life, has really made cracking down on leaks, mishandling of classified information, going after whistleblowers, you know, a centerpiece of his political legacy, going back to his very, very early days as a U.S. senator in the ’70s. And, you know, Biden, at times, actually colluded with the CIA, with Republican lawmakers and others to try to stiffen or tighten the laws around the mishandling of classified information. And a lot of it has been about leaks and whistleblowers.
Donald Trump himself was just vicious toward leakers, and he, of course, wanted to wield the power of the executive branch against whistleblowers of any kind, because he wanted to stop the leaks against himself. And ironically, perhaps, Donald Trump, in 2018, signed into law a kind of escalation of the penalties that people can face for mishandling classified information, with the maximum sentence being extended from one year to five years in prison. And now he himself is under an investigation for
— source democracynow.org | Jan 24, 2023