Did Bill Clinton really ‘lose’ the nuclear codes as Trump claimed - and does it matter?

Donald Trump caused serious alarm this summer when it was revealed he had taken hundreds of government documents with him to his encampment at Mar-a-Lago, and that among them were some of the US’s most classified security secrets – including information about nuclear weapons.

He only fleetingly entertained the idea the documents might have been planted, and has instead largely focused on claiming that he somehow declassified them without following any of the stringent official processes for doing so.

As the documents are reviewed by a court-appointed special master, Mr Trump has turned to another line of defence: pointing to former presidents’ supposed mishandling of sensitive documents.

His latest claim, or rather the latest he has recirculated, is an old story alleging that Bill Clinton briefly mislaid the nuclear codes at the end of his presidency.

Who said Clinton lost the nuclear codes?

Mr Trump shared the story on Truth Social in the form of a tweet from Buzz Patterson, who served as a senior military aide to Mr Clinton from 1996 to 1998, during which time he was one of a handful of people who carried the so-called “nuclear football”.

Mr Patterson, who is now a vociferous Trump supporter, tweeted the claim last week, but told his story as long ago as 2003 in a book about Mr Clinton titled Dereliction of Duty. In his telling, the incident happened in 1998.

“He thought he just placed them upstairs,” wrote Mr Patterson, who claims the event took place just as the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. “We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.”

Mr Patterson’s story refers not to the football but the “biscuit”, a card containing a set of nuclear codes that the president can carry on their person separate from the launch materials in the famous briefcase.

A similar story was told seven years later by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton, who claimed the codes “were actually missing for months”. Where Mr Patterson dates the incident to 1998, Mr Shelton puts it later, in 2000.

Neither event has ever been officially confirmed by Mr Clinton or the executive branch.

Is the story true?

Even if the Clinton story as told by Mr Patterson is true, it makes a poor parallel for the saga of Mr Trump’s alleged hoarding of nuclear documents.

For one thing, if it was indeed the nuclear codes that went missing in the incident Mr Patterson claims occurred, it remains true that the codes can be changed such that the missing ones are useless if found.

This was in fact done at 12pm on 20 January 2021 when Joe Biden became president because Mr Trump refused to attend the inauguration, meaning the traditional handover of the biscuit and football could not be carried out as usual.

Mr Clinton’s alleged loss of the codes – which even Mr Patterson says was brief – would also not be the only time that a president has been separated from the nuclear weapons apparatus.

The same happened in various ways to several of the Cold War-era commanders in chief; the codes were taken by the FBI after Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981, while Jimmy Carter is long rumoured to have accidentally sent the codes to the dry cleaners in his suit pocket.

More importantly, however, Mr Trump stands accused of something far more serious than innocently or negligently losing a changeable piece of the nuclear launch apparatus (which cannot be used on its own). He is accused of illegally retaining classified and top secret information about the US’s nuclear secrets, the nuclear weapons capability of a foreign power, and material that could compromise the safety of human sources.