Trump Just Claimed He ‘Declassified Everything’ in Wild TruthSocial Post. But the DOJ’s Filing Directly Refutes That.
Former President Donald Trump doubled down on one of his now familiar defenses for why the FBI found classified material at his Florida estate, claiming on his TruthSocial that he had already declassified the documents.
The Department of Justice released a bombshell legal filing on Tuesday night, which included a picture of the documents taken in violation of the Presidential Records Act as well as potential national security violations.
Trump responded to the photo during a wild posting spree on Wednesday, writing, “Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see. Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!”
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti pointed out on Wednesday that the DOJ had already debunked this notion from Trump. Mariotti explains that in the filing the “DOJ notes that Trump’s attorney and the custodian there did not assert executive privilege or claim Trump declassified the documents, and the lawyer signed a certification (see below) that all the documents were provided.”
The filing states:
When producing the Fifteen Boxes, the former President never asserted executive privilege over any of the documents nor claimed that any of the documents in the boxes containing classification markings had been declassified. NARA asked representatives of the former President, as required by the Presidential Records Act, to continue to search for any additional Presidential records that had not been transferred to NARA.
Trump’s after-the-fact defense that the documents were previously declassified has won over many of his allies and, as the Washington Post notes, has even led to “some defenders of Trump to go so far as to argue if the president decides something is declassified — even in his own mind, without telling anyone — that’s sufficient to declassify it.”
Trump has previously claimed he had a “standing order” saying all “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”
Gregory Korte in the Post shoots this idea down, noting that “Former Trump White House officials — including two chiefs of staff and a national security adviser — have said they knew of no such standing order, and some said they would have opposed it if there were.”
Additionally, Korte explains that, while the president has broad power to declassify any materials, an official order must be given. Trump’s own administration helped to set a precedent for this in 2018.
Korte explains:
Precedent from the Trump years suggests that even a written announcement that something is declassified is insufficient. In 2018, a federal judge agreed with the Justice Department that a Trump press release instructing the “immediate declassification” of materials related to the investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia was not an order and they remained classified.
