It’s Not Just Trump — LBJ Took Classified Documents Too

“The FBI’s search on Monday of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home has rightfully been huge news. According to the Washington Post, the FBI took action because Trump had left the White House in January 2021 with government documents, and while Trump returned 15 boxes of items to the National Archives earlier this year, officials had come to believe that ‘either the former president or people close to him held on to key records.’ Following the recent search, the FBI took away another 12 boxes of material. Remarkably, however, none of the voluminous news coverage about this has mentioned a parallel to Trump’s behavior: When Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency ended in 1969 and he was replaced by Richard Nixon, Johnson ordered an underling to surreptitiously take highly classified material with him on his administration’s exit. The silence about this may be because the whole episode makes both political parties look horrendous. Democrats appear as feckless cowards who believed that Americans couldn’t handle the truth about their own country. Republicans seem to be criminals and quasi-traitors who were happy to see tens of thousands of American soldiers die if it suited their purposes. The story dates back to the 1968 presidential campaign. The GOP nominee was Nixon, who had served as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. The Democratic candidate was Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president. By that time, about 30,000 Americans had been killed in the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were dead. Anti-war protests in the U.S. and across the world were intense, and polls showed that a majority of Americans had come to believe sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. The war was a key factor in Johnson’s decision not to run again. However, as the November 5 election drew closer, Johnson believed that there was a significant chance to reach an agreement to end the war on terms acceptable to the U.S. Johnson also knew that any signs of momentum toward such an agreement would boost Humphrey’s chances of winning. …”
The Intercept_