It’s really not complicated.
Anyone else would have charged, convicted and locked away by now.
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Not even! He’s still under investigation.
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Oops!
I stand (sit‽) corrected!
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Reagan both classified and declassified documents at will. A notable example was when he classified a conversation and minutes keeping with Richard Nixon that got racist in tone.
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You can forget the whole “he declassified them” argument entirely. Special Master Dearie demanded proof of such things and Trump’s counsel whiffed. End of story.
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“At will” doesn’t mean “in his own mindcanon” though.
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Trump, “You can’t get me! I had my fingers crossed THE WHOLE TIME!”
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And to be honest, that’s kind of insulting to goldfish.
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Here’s an article on how they got released:
“Privacy Considerations” are different from “National Security Considerations” though. Reagan did incorporate his paranoia into several publtished National Security Directives.
Still, it’s been a while since Reagan was in office.
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I was just picking a “before Trump” , and figured I’d need to go before Obama too just to show the longevity of the practice. I suspect if I looked for one from Presidents Obama, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, Ford, and Johnson that I’d find examples too.
I don’t know why people keep giving him the benefit of the doubt that he’s just a stupid fuck up who could not possible pull off taking documents that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would realize could have value. Stealing documents and selling them to the highest bidder is not some high level, complicate plot, especially if your literally the president of the united states with the highest level of access to classified documents. It’s literally been shown in a hundred stupid spy thrillers.
He’s not a fucking genius, by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn’t take smarts to steal shit that you have access to and resell it. Especially if you have people who are asking for specific things - like list of CIA operatives or assets in the field… who later turn up dead.
You STILL have to go through the process. It’s not waving a magic wand. You have to have others involved in the process and classifying and declassifying papers.
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Next verse, same as the first.
As many others here have already pointed out (@ginniecat @kschang777 @armozel @Mindysan33 @jerwin and anyone else I’ve missed), no one is disputing that, as President, Trump could classify and declassify documents at will. He could. But there is a process involved with declassification, which almost certainly includes having to put his signature on an order to declassify information. He can’t just declassify information while in an empty room, and sitting at a bar telling Giuliani he declassified the Kennedy Assassination isn’t going to do the trick, either.
Declassification needs to be documented, if for no other reason than to prevent a junior level WH staffer from randomly declassifying stuff they shouldn’t, or preventing someone like Bannon or Miller demanding classified materials on white supremacists saying “Trump declassified it while golfing in NJ.”
Dearie is doing what any rational person would. He sees a document labeled “Classified.” He tells Trump’s lawyers “Trump say he declassified this document. It looks classified to me. Show me something that proves it’s declassified.” They can’t because he didn’t.
And that is all beside the point. The FBI isn’t making a case around classification. The FBI is making a case that he is in illegal possession of documents he should not have — documents that, regardless the classification remain government property, and documents such as nuclear secrets and human intel that, regardless their actual or perceived classification status, are illegal to posses outside limited, secure facilities. As I’ve mentioned in another thread, the classification argument is equivalent to someone accused of grand theft auto claiming they can’t be arrested because they weren’t speeding.
Thanks to the appeals court’s ruling this is all moot, but the classification argument was either a clumsy attempt to try derailing the investigation or, more likely, try to garner public support through a straw man argument.
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I am STILL waiting for someone to find whatever Tom Fitton was referring to, some 2012 case that Judicial Watch was involved in, that lead him to believe that Trump is entitled to any document he claimed to be “mine!”.
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It’s not so much that the classification of the documents is indisputable, but if Trumps lawyers don’t actually dispute it, the master will regard them as classified.
At the end of the day, there IS a big difference between “The president CAN declassify something,” and “The president HAS declassified something.”
Of course while the classification of the documents might have some bearing on what charges they could give Trump for mishandling them once he was out of office, they really don’t have any bearing on the fact that they are government property.
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Imagine the hash it would create for everyone else if declassifications weren’t noted and the central registry updated?
As well, the second thing they’d do would be to destroy the copies marked classified, and replace them with updated markings, otherwise some shlub would get stopped at a checkpoint, then held until they straightened it out. “The Big O has gone to bed and won’t be up until the crack of noon? Oh well, we have a nice cot for you sir.”
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It seems like the possession of classified documents is of course a huge deal, but seemingly lost in all the splashy coverage of all that is the fact he even had these documents to begin with, classified or not, is itself a crime (or crimes). (And then lying to the government about them, and concealing them, and so on…)
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Except that Fitton isn’t a lawyer.
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