Posted on 08/12/2022 3:46:57 AM PDT by TigerClaws
The blockbuster article in the Washington Post saying President Donald Trump had "revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting" didn’t just put the White House on the defensive. It also put Republican lawmakers in a tight spot.
One of the members of Congress who commented after the newspaper’s revelations was Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho. According to CNN, he told reporters, "The minute the president speaks about it to someone, he has the ability to declassify anything at any time without any process."
Is that accurate? Independent experts said Risch is on target concerning the legal powers of the president. Some experts added, however, that the senator’s formulation left out some context that is relevant for assessing Trump’s alleged actions.
The president’s classification and declassification powers are broad Experts agreed that the president, as commander-in-chief, is ultimately responsible for classification and declassification. When someone lower in the chain of command handles classification and declassification duties -- which is usually how it’s done -- it’s because they have been delegated to do so by the president directly, or by an appointee chosen by the president.
The majority ruling in the 1988 Supreme Court case Department of Navy vs. Egan -- which addressed the legal recourse of a Navy employee who had been denied a security clearance -- addresses this line of authority.
"The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States’" according to Article II of the Constitution, the court’s majority wrote. "His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant."
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, said that such authority gives the president the authority to "classify and declassify at will."
In fact, Robert F. Turner, associate director of the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law, said that "if Congress were to enact a statute seeking to limit the president’s authority to classify or declassify national security information, or to prohibit him from sharing certain kinds of information with Russia, it would raise serious separation of powers constitutional issues."
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."
Indeed, the controlling executive order has been rewritten by multiple presidents. The current version of the order was issued by President Barack Obama in 2009.
The national-security experts at the blog Lawfare wrote in the wake of the Post’s revelation that the "infamous comment" by President Richard Nixon -- that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" -- "is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them. The nature of the system is that the president gets to disclose what he wants."
Two caveats So Risch’s comment holds water when it comes to the extent of the president’s powers. But some experts said that Risch’s formulation leaves out some notable aspects of the particular case involving Trump.
The first caveat: While Trump has the power to declassify information, he doesn’t appear to have done that in this case, at least at the time the story broke.
"There’s no question that the president has broad authority to declassify almost anything at any time without any process, but that’s not what happened here," said Stephen I. Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas School of Law. "He did not, in fact, declassify the information he shared with the Russians, which is why the Washington Post did not publish that information."
And see this rather long and biased article that confirms a POTUS can declassify when and how he so chooses.
So the raid was over what? Classified documents Trump had declassified?
Nuclear launch codes?
Or did Trump have an insider leak a false bit of intel to prompt this overreach to show America he remains the only thread to The Swamp?
They don’t know what he did.
They don’t know what he’s really accused of.
They reference a conversation at the White House, but they went looking for papers in Florida.
They say he can declassify just by speaking.
But they say that’s not what he did.
But they say that this is about a conversation at the White House.
This boils down to “Orange Man Bad”.
Except when the President goes against US foreign policy. /sarc
Gee, didn’t they change it when Biden came into office or are they still using the default code 123456 from the 1960’s......
.
Seb Gorka went into detail on this subject on War Room last night between 5 and 6 pm. Very interesting and thorough. I’m certain the segment can be found on the War Room site. Most of them are.
I’ll take a look at it.
Was the warrant just a pretext to deep dive into everything Trump had in his possession?
Did the FBI agents have the necessary security clearances required to possess these documents?
Letters from foreign leaders were mentioned. Can a POTUS submit a photocopy to the National Archive or must the originals be turned over?
What about the millions of documents Obama took with him that have never been made part of any public archive? Or is that (D)ifferent?
The Democrats and the Propaganda Press weren’t too worried about classified documents when they let Mrs. Bill Clinton get away with giving the Russians thousands of Secret and Top-Secret documents via putting them on an unsecure server.
so far, I haven’t seen where Pres. Trump said he declassified the taken documents...
“Or is that (D)ifferent?”
LOL! There is a (D)ifference.
He doesn’t have to say anything about it
then how would anybody know, including Kash Patel, that documents were declassified ?
Psssssttt. Shhhhhh. Maybe he had the “football” cloned. Don’t say anything. 🤔😲
IDK Maybe he writes it in his diary.
It sounds to me that if he reveals or shows something that is classified to someone, anyone, at any time, then that automatically means its declassified in that nanosecond of an instant.
I think “someone” reads these threads...
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