Some person being interviewed on NPR today said that a President can classify or unclassify anything. He is the source of classification.
Sure, but can an ex-president do so?
His argument, of course, will be “I declassified it while I was still President and then I took it home with me”
Not even the President can declassify nuclear secrets.
The Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954 created a different classification category that can only be declassified by DOE.
My understanding is that he doesn’t just wave a wand and declassify material, he actually needs to go through a process to do so. As president, he can probably do it retroactively, declassifying after revealing it. However, as no longer president, I don’t think he can. Unless he has a paper trail showing that he declassified them while in office, he has no more right to possess, use, or share them than I do.
NYT:
As a result, the Espionage Act makes no reference to whether a document has been deemed classified. Instead, it makes it a crime to retain, without authorization, documents related to the national defense that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.
Prosecutors could argue that a document meets that act’s standard regardless of whether Mr. Trump had pronounced it unclassified short before leaving office; by the same token, defense lawyers could argue that it fell short of that standard regardless of how it had been marked.
Amen, Sister.
The DOJ gave Trump the option for them NOT to reveal the details of the warrant and associated inventory document but he said he had no problem with them doing that. I don’t see how he can now claim that releasing that information caused him any harm. He can’t have it both ways.
I see you aren’t actually familiar with the Donald J. Trump!
No kidding. ISTM, the claim that the president can classify or declassify a document at will is going to be part of the alt-right mutli-dimensional chec, er chess game. So Trump declares everything he had is (a) being stored safely at The Residence (why does everything coming out of any organizatin connected to him sound like a bad real estate advertisement), and (b) was declassified anyway. That’s basically throwing down a gauntlet to see if Biden picks it up, with Biden declaring that all of that material is classified. Then Trump and his flunki, er lawyers will file a case in federal court trying to get the judge to decree that Biden is not president and thus he cannot declare any documents classified.
You heard it here first, folks!
There’s also the point that it’s the information that is classified, not the particular physical document. That means that if Trump did declassify the documents, they are declassified for anyone in the federal government who has access to them. They could publish them without being in breach of the classification laws.
Reported earlier today. Anything to distract Trumpworld, I guess.
I think the plan was that the Afghan government would pay and feed their army so that they would fight the Taliban. Instead, they threw the money the US gave them for the army on the table and split it up.
We have a nominee for best (?) push-poll question of 2022, from Rasmussen:
"Do you agree or disagree with this statement: There is “a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI … as Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo?”?”
46% of likely voters agreed, 38% disagreed.
WTF? Why is Rasmussen considered a real polling firm?
Sarcasm is involved.