John Bolton Ridicules Trump’s ‘Standing Order’ for Declassifying Documents: ‘Shows a Real Level of Desperation’
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John Bolton is not buying former President Donald Trump’s claim that he had a standing order to declassify any documents he took from the White House. And as his former national security advisor, he would be the first in line to know about this curious defense.
The New York Times sought Bolton’s comment following a DOJ-approved search warrant of Trump’s Palm Beach mansion Mar-a-Lago, which led to the confiscation of several classified and top secret documents that appear to run afoul of a 2018 law that Trump himself signed.
“Trump’s Shifting Explanations Follow a Familiar Playbook” is the Times headline, featuring the dek: “The former president and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents, without addressing why he had kept them.”
One such defense put forth in a statement read on Fox News by disgraced journalist John Solomon was that Trump had a “standing order” to declassify any documents in his passions outside of a secure environment. Bolton ridiculed such a defense, calling it “almost certainly a lie.” From the article:
Mr. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser over 17 months, said he had never heard of the standing order that Mr. Trump’s office claimed to have in place. It is, he said, “almost certainly a lie.”
“I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in,” Mr. Bolton said, adding that he had never been told of it while he was working there, and had never heard of such a thing after. “If he were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” he said.
What’s more, he pointed out, secure facilities for viewing sensitive material were constructed at Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida and New Jersey, where he often spent weekends as president, meaning that the documents wouldn’t need to be declassified. And if they were declassified, Mr. Bolton said, they would be considered subject to public record requests.
He continued, “When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation.”
Since leaving the Trump administration, Bolton has been a frequent and vocal critic of Trump.
