DJT: ‘The fact that I have them proves that I declassified them. If I didn’t declassify them, they wouldn’t be here.’
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
If all an ex-President has to do is say “Oh yeah, I totally declassified those documents when I was in office,” then we have a potentially massive security hole. An ex-P could take a bunch of documents with him when he leaves office, and then sell them to the highest bidder. If caught, all he’d have to do is say the magic words.
Furthermore, it puts the government in a weird position- who has the power to declassify any given document, the current President or any of the ex-Presidents, whenever they want? Just for sanity’s sake, this power needs to be strictly limited to the current officeholder.
Sage, I will look it up, but there is an actual process for declassifying. It’s not done just at a whim, at a statement, et cetera. There are a number of steps which have to be taken including a review of the documents in question by other people, forms to fill out, and signatures gathered.
The President is an executive, not a dictator. He tells other people to execute a process and they do so for his signature.
There are no ‘secret declassifications’ Trump can pull out. None.
(Same thing with pardons, btw.)
In theory, the President is the person who has been voted the most wise and trusted person to lead the nation by the people of the United States of America. Constitutionally speaking, you don’t really need to worry about such a thing because no one could get through the free-votes of the non-partisan and deliberative electoral college and be such a scumbag. You’d have to gut the electoral college methodology and turn it into the whipping boy of factionalists and populists, to get to the point where you get dishonest cranks running the country.
In practice, during a time of war or other emergency, there simply might not be time to go through some Congress-enacted bureaucratic red tape procedure, to try and save lives and defend the nation.
Plausibly, Congress could come up with some reasonable law that gives the President immediate declassification powers during a Congressionally approved state of emergency, so that the issue is minimized. Personally, I’d prefer that we just hire people that we can trust, so that it’s not an issue and the government can operate effectively. Wrapping everything in red tape isn’t as good of a solution as just instituting better hiring policies for important positions.
Well, That Could Never Happen Here.
My personal problem with that is that I always read it as The Fucking Gibbon. My problem, I know, but I can’t avoid mixing those two monikers.
Now back to the topic of the documents he (TFG) kept. What could be the worst scenario? What did he have? My two cents: The plans for a scramjet.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a tragedy, tanTrum(p) as a farce.
Here is what the Politifact source I provided says about how the President classifies/declassifies documents:
The official documents governing classification and declassification stem from executive orders. But even these executive orders aren’t necessarily binding on the president. The president is not “obliged to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed,” Aftergood said. “And he can change those.”
So an executive order has to be made, otherwise the classification of documents doesn’t change. What then is an executive order?
An executive order is a signed, written, and published directive from the President of the United States that manages operations of the federal government. They are numbered consecutively, so executive orders may be referenced by their assigned number, or their topic.
So, not a sticky note, or a declaration that he promises he declassified something at some point in the past. It’s on record as all executive orders are.
I’m not reading that as you are.
I’m reading that the source of the process and powers for POTUS declassification authority arises from Executive Orders.
ETA: the current EO that is probably still controlling seems to be this one (which I cannot tear into at the moment):
So he’ll know who to send his henchmen to shoot? He’s a mob boss.
Yes, you might be right on that one, I probably misread that bit.
Trump would get the affidavit, as part of the disclosure of evidence against him (called “discovery”), if he ended up indicted and was facing charges in court.
It must be emphasized that there is a vast difference between what the affidavit says and what the actual search warrant says. The affidavit is a narrative of the entire investigation to that point, leading up to why the police suspect that the evidence they seek is located in the place to be searched.
The warrant itself is just a form. You can find a blank one online. But it will tell us what they were seeking, so we can know what law Trump is suspected of breaking.
(The search warrant return - which itemizes what was taken - will be redacted, so we won’t know what was retrieved, either)
As I said earlier, my fondest hope is that they have incontrovertible evidence that Trump was about to sell military secrets to a foreign adversary. With video recordings and a suitcase full of (marked) cash changing hands. And now they have retrieved the cash and the classified secret material, and the next charges that will be brought against Trump are Espionage. And he’s tried, convicted and sentenced to 50 years.
Hey a guy can dream, right?
Oh, come on! Make it 57 years. One of my worst drawings, but heartfelt.
CNN:
Now, it’s worth noting that Garland didn’t go full ham on Trump and release the affidavit, which outlines all of the particulars informing the investigation.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/11/politics/garland-trump-mar-a-lago-search-bluff/index.html
I’d have paid money for bodycam footage of the agent opening the bathroom door and catching him trying to flush more papers down the toilet.
I’m waiting for the SNL parody commercial advertising the high flush Mar-A-Lago brand toilet, which built-in document shredder.
Thanks for clearing this up. It seems Andrew Weissman did misspeak earlier when I heard him opine on the affidavit being made available.
What are your thoughts about how close DOJ may be to an indictment? I’m sure they have to comb through everything they retrieved and match it up to determine if they have all the documents they expected to find. But once that’s accomplished, isn’t their case about ready to go?
Why would he have physical documents? Wouldn’t all of that stuff be stored electronically? So someone printed off copies and moved them to Mar-A-Lago?
What I hope is evidence of blackmailing some high-lever GQP official – a two-fer.
Wouldn’t he sell to Russia? Those are like his buds.
I see the capability to release the warrant has been kicked back to the DOJ to see if Trump objects. Hey, if he is innocent, he should allow us to see the warrant.
In fact, he should have shown us it already. It isn’t, I think, secret if he doesn’t mind.