Members of the House of Representatives of the US Congress came up with a proposal to toughen up to the reduction of pensions the punishment for improper handling of classified documents for presidents and other persons in power. This is reported by TASS with reference to the CBS television company.
According to her, the pension of a president or vice president found to be negligent in handling classified information could be cut by 50%. The corresponding proposal was put forward by Democrat Mike Quigley and Republican Darin Lahoud.
They also proposed depriving senior officials of access to classified data and obliging them to pay heavy fines of up to $500,000 for each charge. The authors of the bill suggest that such a serious measure of punishment will help reduce the number of similar incidents in the future.
In January, it became known that a batch of secret documents was found in the building associated with US President Joe Biden, a Washington think tank, opened with the support of the University of Pennsylvania. They date back to when Biden was Vice President of the United States. According to the White House, the papers were discovered by the head of state’s lawyers in November 2022. The documents were located in an office space used by Biden from 2017 to 2019, before he announced his candidacy for the presidential election. Later, secret papers were also found at Biden’s home in Wilmington.
A similar situation with the discovery of official documents in the possession of former US President Donald Trump was the reason for the August 8, 2022 searches of his estate in Mar-a-Lago. Trump argued that there could be no wrongdoing on his part, since he, as president, had the authority to declassify all documents in his possession. An exception would be materials related to the nuclear sphere: here the powers of the president to declassify are limited. These documents, according to The Washington Post, were found in Mar-a-Lago.
Source: Rosbalt
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