(March 7, 2019 at 3:21 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(March 7, 2019 at 11:55 am)Yonadav Wrote: Unfortunately, this story mostly just shows how confused our society has become.
Trump challenges Obama to voluntarily reveal his academic record.
OK. Trump can do that. It's up to Obama if he wants to reveal those records.
The school that Trump went to gets several calls from people claiming to be Trump's friends, asking the school to turn over Trump's records, so that they can 'keep them safe'.
Who the hell believes that? You don't have to be very bright to strongly suspect that those calls were made by journalists who were taking a stab a getting the school to hand over Trump's academic records. You don't have to be very bright to know that the school would be liable if they did turn over those records. And you don't have to be very bright to realize that the school's administrators would have to take steps to keep an employee from digging up Trump's records and leaking them.
So you don't have to be very bright to realize that if you were the school's administrator, you would also take steps to secure Trump's academic records.
Do you think that Obama's records wouldn't be secured if people started calling his school, claiming to be friends of Obama who want Obama's academic records so that they can keep them safe? For all I know, Obama's academic records were locked away in a very secure location a long time ago.
Trying to get people to release information that they have no right to release by using some plausible sounding pretext is the oldest trick in the book. I am pretty alarmed by how sleaziness is becoming so normal to people. We can't trust employees any more. A few years ago, academic records were completely safe under casual security. You could just tell employees that those records were confidential and not release them to people, and you could trust employees to abide by that. But now everyone thinks that being a sleazy employee is normal, and that it's acceptable for some low level employee with access to confidential information to abuse their employer's trust and leak the information.
This is all a pretty fake story. Trump's records being tightly secured isn't real news. The bigger story is how sad it is that we can no longer trust low level employees with routine security of confidential records anymore.
Actually, the school got calls from alumni donors, not just random 'people claiming to be Trump's friends' (according to the story in the Washington Post). It is highly unlikely that these people were journalists, as it is pretty simple to identify an alumnus who is also a donor.
What is troubling is that the school partially complied with the alumni, in that they went on a pretty through search and found Trump's academic records. And then - instead of handing them over - hid them. I'm unaware of similar steps being taken to secure Mr. Obama's transcripts (but we have reason to believe that Obama had VERY good grades).
This story, coming on the heels of Mr. Cohen's rather lackluster testimony in which he claims to have been directed to threaten people if they released Trump's records, has a ring of truth about it.
Boru
People claiming to be alumni donors. They weren't. If you believe that they really were Trump's buddies, I have a really good deal for you on a bridge.
The school had to go looking for Trump's records and secure them. It is a violation of federal law for an employee to leak them. The administration knew that the calls for Trump's records were pretexts. When you know that someone is trying to gain access to a former student's records, you have to take steps to secure them.
During George W's presidency, someone with access to his school records leaked them. That's pretty much where this sort of ugliness started.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
