Rand Paul: Overclassification Is Used to Avoid Oversight, Cover up Info on COVID Origin

On Tuesday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “Eric Bolling The Balance,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) stated that he believes both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden probably had documents that weren’t particularly important or secret and were simply overclassified and the intelligence community classifies things that don’t need to be so they can avoid oversight and gain power and said that the investigation of the origins of COVID is “being stymied by the intelligence agencies classifying things that need to be declassified.”

Paul said, “I think there’s an overclassification problem here. Everything’s classified. And in all likelihood, what we’ll find is this is not some sort of organized scheme to have the secrets to the nuclear weapon in his Corvette. I think it’s more likely than not that we’ve classified so many documents that it’s hard to find documents that are not classified. The one problem with classifying so much is that there is, right now, to my knowledge, pretty good information out there in the intelligence community about the virus originating from the lab in China, and yet they classify it to try to prohibit people [like] me giving you the information that we already know that this came from a lab. And so this is a real problem. We need to allow less classification so the American people can understand more about what’s going on with their government.”

He added, “I go to classified hearings, and I haven’t actually been to a classified hearing where I actually thought I heard a secret, to tell you the truth. In fact, occasionally, they’ll say, now this really is secret, don’t mention this. … I do think…that ultimately, we need to use the same standard for everyone, and we need to realize that part of this problem is overclassification of documents. When Trump — when this came up, and Trump had some documents, the left-wing media acted as if oh, these are the Manhattan Project. This is the secrets to the nuclear weapon. … Really, most of the stuff we see is not really that secret. But it’s all stamped that way. The intelligence community does this so they have more power and we have less power. I have long argued that Congress needs to know more and the American people need to know more about what the CIA does, what the FBI does. Because we can’t oversee them, we can’t have oversight and reform if we don’t know what they’re doing, and they avoid oversight by classifying things, and often there’s a policy decision like, for example, with COVID, we need to know if COVID came from a lab so we can prevent this from happening again. Some of this is being stymied by the intelligence agencies classifying things that need to be declassified.”

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