Because this would be doing a good thing, not a malicious one.

I wonder how greed figures in, it's not like companies need to be moral to end up on the right side

Not usually, it's Hanlon's Razor.

hell, taking a picture of the screen with a phone would have been better. this is literally the only way to have fucked this up that i can come up with. like maybe if they used too thin of a sharpie on physical paper, but even that probably would have blocked parts of the text.

that said, i can see the average technologically inept person making this mistake. if it wasn't on purpose, it would have to be someone that didn't grow up with computers. either someone trump's age, or someone who grew up with only smart phones. Iwould bet the latter knowing trump and his cheapness. this can't have been done by an existing professional in the system, they're too experienced normally. I know this is a lot of assumptions, but i bet it would have had to be a young intern from trump's camp. and i do bet that over intentional malice towards trump. anyone that did this on purpose would be smart enough to see far enough ahead to predict themselves get arrested or killed as soon as people figured it out. also, hanlon's razor.

i think i actually made almost this exact mistake once. difference is mine was for an assignment in high school 20 years ago and the consequence was getting snickered at by my peers. it's a genuinely easy thing to overlook if you're not used to using tools in a word editor or most other software. it's also entirely unsurprising that trump's camp would botch a project. he doesn't pay people and is a menace to his employees. no one compitent wants to work for him unless they're true believers.

so yeah, jumping to conclusions about this being intentional is conspiracy nut thinking. if someone's reasoning includes bits like "it just makes too much sense" and "think about how much they have to gain/lose" they're just jumping to conclusions without evidence. remember that correlation does not imply causation. just because something happened near a powerful person that affects the world or that person significantly doesn't mean there's a conspiracy. just because the motive for an action exists or makes sense that doesn't mean it happened. i have a motive to want to kill Trump, but if he dies while I'm near d.c. that doesn't make me a suspect. 90% of the people near d.c. at any given moment have motive to kill trump.

Stupidity transcends politics

Prior Incantato!

Universal Security Box

It's those internet tubes, can't trust em

That's the opposite. Your protecting the cable from being manipulated. OP is talking about protecting the cable from being read.

The problem isn't that they were keeping a USB cable in a secured location for security concerns, the problem was that they were doing so because they believed bits were left over in the copper itself and enough such that data would be recoverable. Like marbles through a tube.

I do hope the practice was due to your point and that the particular person was just naive, misinterpreting a presumably shitty PowerPoint.