1970S THROWBACK: "HENRY KISSINGER"

WASHINGTON – Forget Presidents Trump and Biden. The biggest collector of top-secret White House documents was most likely Henry Kissinger – and he’s managed to take some of those classified secrets with him to his grave, experts say.

Hours after his death at age 100, the non-profit and non-partisan National Security Archive released a “declassified obituary” that shows “the long paper trail of secret documents” recording Kissinger’s policy deliberations, conversations, and directives on many initiatives for which he became famous. Among them: Détente with the Soviet Union, the U.S. opening to China and Middle East shuttle diplomacy.

That long secret paper trail, made public by the Archive after a hard-fought battle with Kissinger, also shows the hidden side of his eight-year tenure as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the tumultuous 1970s.

That includes Kissinger’s role in the secret overthrow of democracies in Latin America, secret bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia and secret wiretaps of his own aides, according to scores of documents cited by the Archive, which is housed at The George Washington University in the nation’s capital.

But it is the sheer volume of information that Kissinger took with him when leaving office that is perhaps most noteworthy in the present context. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump − and Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence − have endured Justice Department investigations for taking classified materials from the White House when they left.

Biden and Pence say they never took any intentionally and that they’ve returned everything that is supposed to be secured and eventually declassified by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, where appropriate, for public dissemination.

More:Biden, Trump, Pence aren’t alone: Millions access sensitive documents, mishandling is common

Trump, on the other hand, has been less cooperative and is being prosecuted for what the Justice Department says are extremely serious violations of the Espionage Act — including the illegal retention of defense information and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. He has pleaded not guilty and insists he had the presidential right to take them to his Mar-a-Lago estate with him upon leaving office.

“In all of those cases it looks like they took a relative handful of items,” especially Biden and Pence, whose confidential documents appeared to have been mixed with other personal papers, said Tom Blanton, the Archive’s director since 1992 who helped lead the fight to make Kissinger’s records public.

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