Now they tell us.

Everyone in the government who deals with any security matters knows that overclassification is a pandemic. It’s also a major security problem. On the one hand, everything is classified and on the other, low-level personnel and contractors who shouldn’t have access to actual classified materials end up having access for technical reasons resulting in everything from Snowden to the recent Discord war game leaks.

And despite all the recent hysteria that culminated in the Mar-a-Lago raid, followed by searches of Biden properties, this stuff is commonplace. Classified documents routinely get taken along by high-level officials.

Every administration since President Ronald Reagan’s has mismanaged classified documents, according to National Archives and Records Administration officials who spoke to a congressional committee behind closed doors in March.

Good thing they only said it behind closed doors and not when they were inciting raids of a former president’s properties.

Mark Bradley, who directs the agency’s Information Security Oversight Office, said that since 2010, his office has gotten more than 80 calls from libraries that have found classified information in papers belonging to members of Congress.

For example, Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine — who left Congress in 1980 and was secretary of state in the last year of President Jimmy Carter’s administration — included 98 classified documents when his papers were given to Bates College.

The briefing transcript itself is absurdly redacted which just hammers home the absurd overclassification.

It does include the admission that, “I will tell you that — so every PRA administration from Reagan forward we have found classified information in unclassified boxes.”

The congressional briefing contains a fairly reasonable discussion between congressional Democrats, Republicans and National Archives personnel about how documents get mixed together.  It’s interesting reading only if you want a sense of how classified documents can end up in all sorts of places. But most people will just recognize the hypocrisy of this belated admission that a commonplace problem was once again weaponized into an investigation complete with raids of political opponents.