Because it's on my mind, below are the answers to the two most common questions floating around regarding classified documents.
To begin, there is no "Classified" in the code. The three levels are Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Those are the public levels; there might be levels where even the name of the classification level is secret. This post pertains to the first two and somewhat within the context of recent discoveries at the homes of President Biden and former Vice President, Mike Pence.
Why Didn't NARA Know The Docs Were Missing?
The simple answer is there's no central database that catalogs classified documents and the whereabouts of every copy of each. It would be an impossible task, considering there are literally billions of these docs and countless copies of each. This is why no one was aware that Trump, Biden, and Pence still had classified docs in their possession. Trumps were discovered because a staff member recognized a former President shouldn't have 200+ boxes of the stuff and dropped a dime on him.
A quick example to illustrate how these things multiply: A CIA task force conducts its weekly review, requiring a number of docs be printed for the forty people in the meeting. A few get thrown to the Pentagon, DNI, the President, and so on. There could literally be close to a thousand copies of several classified documents to come from that one meeting.
Also, there are many folks with clearances outside the US government, which is necessary to actually design and build things like fighter jets. Every final assembly and many of the subassembly drawings are classified; you can imagine the number of docs associated with that activity.
Do we have that many secrets to need billions of documents?
The short answer is no. The issue of overclassification has been known to the intelligence community for years. Overclassification is when a document doesn't really warrant to be classified, but is. For example, a doc that compiles information found in the public domain can wind up as Secret; this happens frequently. The mindset is better to be safe than sorry.
On the other end of a classified doc's lifespan, the intelligence community isn't the best at declassifying material that's out of date or shouldn't have been classified in the first place. The process is time consuming, as it should be to prevent material that's still sensitive from being released. But there are innumerable docs that could be declassified that no one's bothered to do so. I'd be willing to bet there's still a Top Secret document evaluating the transistor's (invented in 1947) impact on defense strategy.
Can you remove classified documents from their source?
It depends. Constitutional officers have a lot of latitude on this versus other schmucks and members of congress. This means a VP has the ability to remove materials the same as the President.
A source I've found very helpful is below.
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