‘I Tried Not to Burst Out Laughing’: NatSec Lawyer Rips Trump’s Claim He Could Declassify Docs by ‘Thinking About It’

National security attorney Bradley P. Moss said he tried not to laugh when he heard former President Donald Trump claim a president can declassify documents merely by “thinking about it.”

Trump sat down with Fox News host Sean Hannity for an hour-long interview at Mar-a-Lago that touched on several subjects, including the August FBI raid of his home where agents found thousands of government documents.

At one point, Trump told Hannity he was able to declassify documents simply by “thinking about it.” Asked if a president has a process for declassification, Trump said:

If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, ‘It’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it. And there doesn’t have to be a process. There can be a process but there doesn’t have to be. You’re the president.

On The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell played the clip and asked Moss for his thoughts. Moss responded:

Yeah, I saw that clip right before I came on and I tried not to burst out laughing. You know, look, here’s the thing with Donald Trump: whenever he starts spouting off this garbage, the one thing to remember is there’s always a tiny scintilla of truth buried within what he saying.

The president, the incumbent president, has complete unfettered discretion to declassify information. That is true. He is not bound by a process, that is technically true.

He added while there is no set process for declassifying documents, there are regulations presidents must abide by, such as alerting the intelligence community.

Moss concluded, “If he is sitting there and thinking in his mind, hey, ‘I decided I’m going to declassify the secrets about Iran tonight,’ the NSA needs to know if it was their signals intelligence, or the CIA needs to know.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.