Yeah, that’s what I meant by this bit. And I’d suggest that for review on declassification, it should not be the cabinet, but reps from the agencies who “own” the documents. They’re much less likely to rubber stamp the president’s requests.
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One thing that was posited back in 2016 was Trump’s time in office would test how resilient our public institutions were. That’s the only possible silver lining to his shit-storm cloud-- his deliberate work to twist the government to his own benefit might result in plugging whatever loopholes were always there but not recognized.
Unfortunately I don’t think the GOP is interested in fixing anything.
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Yeah, they’re making it seem like they’re not entirely clear what he might have retained, which from what I’ve read just isn’t the case. All these documents are numbered, tracked and checked out by the president’s staff with the presumption they’ll be returned to the archives. So they know exactly what he took out, the only thing is they don’t know what he destroyed, what he lost/gave away and what he still has. So it’s really just a question of what they can still recover from him.
All of this assuming he didn’t make copies, which could go either way - he himself seems unlikely to do so (lazy, doesn’t want to dilute the documents’ value, doesn’t think ahead and was assuming no one would demand them back), but his staff might if they saw value in it.
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Trump had the keys to the kingdom, so he of course made copies of the keys and sold them to all buyers.
I don’t think the question will be what secrets he stole, it’s more like what didn’t he take. Someone willing to compromise nuclear secrets for cash cares more about cash than he does about the safety of the world. He’s a billionaire who steals from charities, doesn’t pay any bills, and keeps trying to take more. He’s still begging poor people for cash.
Trump railing to his cult about the Deep State is going to be very handy for him. Everyone outside his influence will see that decades of the work of our intelligence and diplomatic communities are heavily compromised, but his legion of idiots will just see it as him sticking it to the Deep State.
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It’s not possible to plug. All laws and procedures here assume there is someone who isn’t just ignoring everything. So, you’ve got a document that’s only allowed to be in the SCIF. You could have it display on a device that’s physically impossible to remove from the SCIF. Just a monitor and removing it would remove it from the source of the display. But, for whatever reason, it’s on paper. So, now you have a physical copy of the information that is not coupled to being in the room. The only thing keeping it in the room is the willingness of people to not remove it, or the willingness of someone guarding the door to prevent others from removing it. Now, make the first person responsible for picking the second one. Nothing beyond their own willingness to not remove it and not choose a guard that will let them remove it, stops them from taking the item. There is no proactive defense against that beyond not having people in the room willing to take the secrets out and in charge of everything.
My understanding is that there is a process. That while the president can declassify just about anything, they still need to follow a process to actually declassify stuff. That process also puts restrictions on what is possible. Without following those processes, the stuff isn’t actually declassified. So, while the president is the decision maker (and can make some poor decisions), they cannot just waive a hand and it’s magically declassified.
Which, it’s worth noting here, all the talk about “it was all declassified” is just talk and PR statements. NONE of the legal filings or replies has presented that argument. Presumably they would need to show the paper trail instead of magic hand waiving and there is no paper trail to show. It’s just a lie to distract people and change the talking points.
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They’ve tried so hard to not arrest him
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From a few years of my working in that environment it was completely electronic, on KVM systems linked to servers in an even-more-locked-down area. I’ve never seen an actual piece of SCI paper, and of thousands of TS nuclear-related documents (RD) I’ve seen two “in the flesh”. All else is also stored remotely on a server.
As a simple lowly user it was awesome. Annual accountability can be done by counting/ID-ing drives in a server rack and it takes an hour rather than days for paper.
But I’m no president. Isn’t this the guy that got emails printed? It would make sense that all of this SCI got made into paper.
And on declass, I don’t know of things classified by Executive Order (NSI) but I’d expect the relevant EO would define the declassification process. The correlating documents for nuclear/RD things are actually federal statutes (Atomic Energy Act and so on), and those docs do define the declass process - and thank dog that the president has no say in the matter, from my understanding.
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My thought as well. Gone as in Sold, Stolen or Gifted. Perhaps the originals are still lying in the copier tray overlooked or forgotten. Stinking Traitor.
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The mar a lago documents were marked FRD.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/hss/Classification/docs/CTI-Training-RD-FRD-Briefing.pdf
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Perhaps it’s “shitfest.”
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If he wanted to sell the contents and get away with it, he would have copied them and given back all of the originals. If he wanted to sell them to foreigners, he would have kept them more secure in MAL. Because I guarantee that there are foreign intelligence assets in the staff there. But of course he is an idiot. I’m guessing that the documents probably have either the “Eurion constellation”* on them or the copiers are set to recognize the classification markings on the top and bottom of the pages to make copying classified documents slightly more difficult.
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i was wondering the same thing. fwiw, reality winner was able to copy the documents on russian election hacking, it’s just that the tracking marks let them know who had copied the documents.
( it’s also kind of funny that the wikipedia page has an image of the omron rings on the 20 dollar bill. proving that it’s not that difficult as long as you’re not literally trying to copy them. )
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This. At the end of the day all rules, procedures, policies and laws are only effective as long as there are people willing and able to enforce them. So unless there’s someone willing to physically accost the President of the United States and take the papers out of his hands then you can’t really stop him from doing shit like this.
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Just the elections.
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I’m sure it’s not that difficult, but I’m also sure that Trump is too stupid to figure out how to get around it.
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Not just someone either, but someone who is difficult or embarrassing to replace. Assuming anything would actually be embarrassing to him.
Just like we saw with him replacing cabinet members and other appointees to get one that would do what was requested. If the guard at the door said he couldn’t do something, he would just replace that guard and try again. Repeat until successful.
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Check his other properties!!!
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