They are, indeed, claiming that. Thing is, none of the sections cited say anything about classification, so that is not a factor.
17 Likes
I believe I’ve read that people are seriously debating the legal question as to whether, if the president decides to declassify a document, but never actually tells anyone this, is that document actually declassified, or does it require some positive action?
(This is, of course, a stupid, stupid argument.)
20 Likes
Except, based on what I’ve been reading online, this sort of material wouldn’t normally have been printed out. So, how did he get paper copies? Arranging for paper copies seems to imply some forethought and a plan, however little worked out.
18 Likes
And as people have pointed out, if there’s one thing we can guarantee, it’s that Trump himself never read a single one of them, doesn’t understand what’s in them, and only cares about them insofar as it gives him perceived money, power, or bragging rights.
Also, he can barely operate twitter. There is no fucking way that man figured out how to connect a secure iPad to a printer and bypass the protocols to get these documents to a printer.
Someone else, by this logic, chose those documents to be printed, arranged for them to be printed, and arranged for Trump to take them out of the White House.
That would be why the FBI are fingerprinting those documents right now.
27 Likes
Stupid, stupid argument for a stupid, stupid man. It fits.
17 Likes
And I’m sure that WH security, which normally uses self-wiping iPads for the stuff Trump had, has their own methods of watermarking documents beyond printer yellow dots.
Would Trump be dumb enough to think that he could just make photocopies without a trail leading straight back to him?
Oh. I. Hope. So.
22 Likes
And, curiously, they always seem to accuse people of things that they themselves are guilty of…
7 Likes
It just feels so difficult to be able to prove Trump knew what was in any particular box and specifically directed a particular box to be moved to Mar-a-lago.
Can’t he, as ever, just say “I didn’t know what was in that particular box” and “I myself never directed that particular box to be retained”? Cant it always be blamed on carelessness of minions? (In the same way that it’s going to be his chief accountant, and not himself, who is blamed for his company’s tax fraud.)
4 Likes
Nope. His property. And the statute cares not whether the accused knew what was in them. It’s all about taking and possessing.
21 Likes
And he cant claim that he didnt know certain things were classified either. The NISPOM has specific guidelines about how classified material is to be marked and which subjects are to be classified, and to what level. Within each document each paragraph is marked as (U) unclassified, (S) secret, (TS) top secret etc, so you know which specific areas are classified.
19 Likes
OT, but this is like the 3rd or 4th parody of William Carlos William’s work that I’ve seen recently… I wonder why he’s popping up all of a sudden? 
9 Likes
His initials are J and K.
4 Likes
A perennial meme
10 Likes
12 Likes
That becomes a problem when those minions communications can be got, or those minions can be compelled to testify.
That’s why there was (and continues to be) all that gold bricking around subpoenas. The fact that a lot of this stuff is suddenly moving fast and escalating is down to all those challenges, disputes and refusals finally clearing the courts.
13 Likes
These kids and their memeable rock and roll… poems…
16 Likes
It wouldn’t surprise me if at least some of the documents were on behalf of whoever had his ear at the moment, rather than purely personal.
More or less by necessity even the organization and filing conventions for any large volume of information tend to be somewhat dry and esoteric by the standards of people not familiar with them, and I can only suspect that even documents juicy enough to make a spy’s entire career tend toward the ‘brutally dry and only really meaningful with some knowledge of their context’ genre; rather than just being pictures of the Area-51 reptilians and one line summaries of deep state secrets; and The Donald has never been accused, by his friends or his foes, of being the sort of guy who would sift through the archives.
He’d certainly be the sort to broadly and impulsively demand that a minion go pull whatever someone told him it was presidential for him to have; or was necessary for one of his plans; or met the search criteria ‘hunter biden ukraine’ or ‘her emails’; so eminently steerable by someone who knows the system better than he does and has his ear; and wholly unbounded by either caution or propriety in records handling; but unlikely to be an independently capable researcher.
5 Likes
When your most famous poem begins
This is just to say
I have taken the…
the parodies just write themselves!
16 Likes
Absolutely… I just think it’s weird that they’re all showing up right now…
15 Likes
Wouldn’t it make the documents accessible under FOIA?
Either he has valuable secret documents or just a bunch of paper anyone can request.
2 Likes
