My regular reader (Hi Jeff!) will recall that I have oft spoken of my 25-plus years as an active-duty military officer. And for much of that time, I carried a variety of clearances that granted me access to a variety of classified documents. As I started out as a “finger on the button” ICBM launch officer, my clearance – called “Top Secret-ESI” for “extremely sensitive information” – allowed me to see the nuclear secrets of our nation, from where we aimed to – well – other stuff I’m still never going to talk about. It was both fascinating and sobering, as our war planners were very good at their jobs.

During my time teaching political science at the Air Force Academy, I had several temporary duty assignments (we call them TDYs) during summer academic breaks. One summer I spent a few weeks at the Pentagon, assisting in the office that was negotiating the START nuclear treaty with the then-Soviet Union. It was interesting work, and it was my first exposure to a Top-Secret fax machine, which every evening would spit out dozens of pages reflecting the delegation in Europe’s work for that day. I always wondered who footed the phone bill for an hour of long-distance to Geneva.

And then, twice, I had the opportunity to serve on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House in the late 1990s, where I had an even cooler clearance, a TS-SCI, which stood for Top-Secret, Secure Compartmented Information. That clearance allowed me access to the NSC’s computer network which, let me assure you, has some really cool stuff to read if you are interested in the world around you. I even got to read (after he was done with it) the President’s Daily Briefing. Back in my day (does that sound too grumpy?) it was pages long, and Bill Clinton devoured it all, often responding to the authors with very specific and knowledgeable questions. A recent president, not so much…

On my very first day at the White House, before I even logged into the computer system, I attended a briefing that made it very clear how we were to treat the information that crossed our desks. For every email, a box would pop up and we would have to state whether it would be classified (and if so, at what level) or unclassified. And, equally importantly, we had to assign a value of “record,” meaning it would be kept forever in accordance with the laws regulating presidential communications, or “non-record” if it was to be discarded. Our briefer stressed that we were to always assume it was for the record, unless it was as trivial as “where shall we go to lunch?” But even then, they warned, if there was any additional content, save that sucker for the National Archives. The same rules applied to any hard copy documents we created or reviewed. We hit those docs with a rubber stamp, and we saved everything and carefully filed it away as part of the permanent record of the administration.

Which, of course, brings me to Donald Trump…

Recent news stories have brought to our attention Trump’s rather cavalier attitude toward classified materials and the legal requirement to save any documents he created (e.g., I did my masters’ thesis work at the Gerald Ford library, where I sorted through hundreds of his hand-written notes).  It is clear that Trump often tore up documents (of varying levels of classification) as if the tearing rendered the documents unclassified and unreadable. Multiple sources have stated that they found bits of torn up documents, well, floating in the presidential toilet – a charge he denies. Not the tearing, but only the flushing. Trump also asserts that the National Archives was just fine with him taking 15 boxes of documents (including, it is widely reported, some classified docs) to his Florida home for, I dunno, storage?

And those looking at the records that the Archives sent over to the January 6thcommission (over Trump’s objection, of course) show something remarkable, beyond some being on torn-up paper. It seems that the White House call log (did I mention we logged every call?), for some unexplained reason, contain ZERO records of phone calls between Trump and other folks during the insurrection. We know from Trump’s own words and the statements of others that Trump was on the phone a lot that day, yet his official record is just blank for those hours. Hmm….

I have often rallied against hypocrisy and shall yet again mount that rickety soapbox. I do so in hopes that maybe a few of Trump’s supporters will finally admit that Trump did something wrong. Can I get an Amen?

Recall please that Hillary Clinton was savagely attacked by Trump and his minions over her use of a private email server. Guess what? Turns out multiple members of Trump’s team also used private servers. That includes Trump’s daughter, as well as his chief of staff and others. I haven’t heard the Trump team apologize to Hillary yet, have you?

I bring all this up because I hope that you will join me in jousting against the Trumpian windmill that is honor. We need look no further than the recent CP story about the Trumpian Mesa County Clerk to see, yet again, an apparently willful defiance of the rule of law because, I guess, they are special and above the law?

I sincerely apologize to any researcher who, pouring through old White House documents in search of historical significance, will have to struggle through my emails about lunch (often at the local McDonalds by the White House). But our nation is better off knowing of my horrible dining habits if that level of document preservation also lets the researcher find important historical events.

We likely will never know what happened during those critical hours on January 6th, nor will we know what governmental business Ivanka Trump conducted when she violated the federal records act on her private server.

But please, Trumpers, can we at least agree that Trump was wrong to defy the law? And if not, boy do some people owe Hillary an apology.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.