Let’s say you’re a world leader who has improperly retained juicy national security secrets after leaving office. What would be a safer place to stash them: your bathroom or your garage?
According to the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who on Monday defended Donald Trump after photos released by federal investigators showed boxes of classified documents piled high next to a shower in the ex-president’s Florida resort home, the answer is the bathroom.
“A bathroom door locks,” the California Republican said.
That would be more secure, McCarthy argued, than the location where classified documents were found stored in Joe Biden’s residence: in his garage “that opens up all the time”.
Biden disclosed in January that his attorneys had discovered a small number of files in his house’s garage, commenting: “My Corvette is in a locked garage, so it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.” The president said he returned all the materials as soon as they were discovered, which is why he hasn’t been charged like Trump, who federal prosecutors say made repeated false statements and conspired to obstruct them from retrieving the files.
At this point there’s no telling how Trump’s unprecedented prosecution will pan out. That said, we can certainly spare a quick moment to settle the question about which part of the house would be best to keep one’s improperly retained state secrets.
Multiple construction and home improvement professionals who spoke to the Guardian agreed: a bathroom would be one of the worst possible places in your home to store important files.
Zach Barnes-Corby, the head of construction at Block Renovation, said that surfaces in bathrooms are treated with water-resistant materials to endure the high level of humidity. “Anything that is stored in the bathroom that isn’t moisture-resistant is going to deteriorate very quickly,” he says. “You have mold and mildew that can quickly spread through any materials. You also have exposure to cleaning products, which can deteriorate lightweight materials like documents easily.”
Joshua Bartlett, who runs the home improvement website I’ll Just Fix it Myself, agrees: “There’s too much risk of destroying any document in a place where there is always water usage, especially in a place like Mar-a-Lago, where I’m pretty sure bathrooms get cleaned daily,” he said.
Could a bathroom lock offer some protection? The experts agree: no.
“It would be very unusual for a bathroom door to lock from the outside as they are almost always set up to only lock from the inside,” says Bartlett, explaining the obvious flaw in McCarthy’s thinking.
Bathroom door locks have another weakness: almost every one has a small hole that allows it to be opened from the outside with a small object like a pin, “in case one of the kids gets locked in”, says Eric Marie, a Chicago-based contractor. “When it comes to safety, a bathroom door will be a two out of 10.”
If a bathroom door is a two, then a garage door would be “more like an eight or nine”, says Marie. The panels may be made of steel, aluminum, or solid wood, and some even have additional locking latches on the inside. “It’s much harder to go through a garage door than any door in your house,” the contractor says.
Unlike what McCarthy implied, “absolutely every garage door has a locking mechanism,” says Barnes-Corby. Typically garage doors are designed so that “without the specific controller of the door, you can’t open it. There’s no way to pry it open.
“I would say a garage door is more secure for sure than a bathroom door,” he adds.
While Trump and Biden’s storage choices may be concerning, they wouldn’t be the first officials to leave classified documents in questionable places.
In April, sensitive documents about the inner workings of a UK Royal Navy nuclear submarine were reportedly found on the bathroom floor in a packed Wetherspoons pub.
In 2018, a New Zealand intelligence agency staffer left a bag of unidentified classified documents in a cafe bathroom.
And in 2016, a US navy veteran, Harold T Martin, was arrested after investigators discovered he was hoarding at his home thousands of physical documents and hard drives containing 50 terabytes of national security data, with some materials strewn across his garage and the backseat of his car. Martin’s federal defender said he was a “compulsive hoarder” and “not Edward Snowden”. He was sentenced in 2019 to nine years in prison. Something for McCarthy to think about.
