- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
DONALD TRUMP SAID he “absolutely” plans to testify in the federal government’s case against him regarding classified documents he removed from the White House. “I’m allowed to do whatever I want … I’m allowed to do everything I did,” the former president told conservative podcast host Hugh Hewitt.
In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that dropped Wednesday, the host asked Trump, “Did you direct anyone to move the boxes, Mr. President? Did you tell anyone to move the boxes?” referring to the boxes of more than 300 classified documents the federal government seized last year from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
“I don’t talk about anything. You know why? Because I’m allowed to do whatever I want. I come under the Presidential Records Act,” Trump replied, while also taking a quick detour to bash Hewitt. “I’m not telling you. You know, every time I talk to you, ‘Oh, I have a breaking story.’ You don’t have any story. I come under the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to do everything I did.”
My understanding from briefly covering this in law school and reading some technical articles about it over the past year, is that classification falls under congressional powers, and the only reason the executive branch has any say in the matter as to documents is because Congress passed laws delegating some of that authority to the executive branch. In no circumstance under the law, can the president simply state that a document is declassified and make it so because no such exists under the statute.
The president has authority to initiate the process to declassify any documentwith the exception of nuclear secrets.
The president could read a classified non-nuclear document publicly, and the subject matter would lose its classification, but not the document itself, until it went through the applicable agency’s legal procedure for declassification.
Trump had not initiated such processes and had not declassified the subject matter publicly while president.
The entirety of the above statement are irrelevant to two things as far as Trump’s crimes: any of Trump’s actions after the lawful end of his tenure and nuclear secrets, to which none of the above applies, as Congress delegated classification of nuclear secrets to our nuclear energy regulators.
Trump also lied repeatedly to the public and law enforcement, and engaged in an open conspiracy to illegally destroy evidence and tamper with witnesses.
By the time this is over, I won’t be surprised if it’s revealed he sold nuclear secrets to the Saudis, Russia, or China. Dude had been a foreign agent since the 80’s.
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He admitted on tape he did not declassify the documents while president and no longer can now that he isn’t. That torpedoes any bullshit mind-link declassification powers he asserts he had. He literally admitted it. Literally. I mean in the classic sense of the word literally. He literally already admitted he did not declassify them when being interviewed for a potential book deal.
This is actually the only good argument anyone has made in all these comments. Everything else is “orange man bad hopium”. And is the only reason i’m not 100% sure he won’t be
chargedconvicted. But i’m still 99% sure he’s good to go. Just will have to sit through years of court battles over it.Brother you need to improve your reading comprehension. What about the whole ‘declassification is not done only by the president but its actually a whole process that goes through congress’ argument?
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He was already charged.
You got me, found a gotcha. I mean convicted.
As opposed to “he just needs to think it and it is so?”