FBI Executed a Warrant at Mar a Lago; the Investigation Continues

Either they have been renumbered or my post saying that some trumpistas could attack the judges family or the agents families. Did you watch January 6th? I am not saying all trump’s supporters are capable of violence but some did just try to overthrow our government.

 

Great minds may think alike. lol. But if trump can declassify things in his mind then certainly Biden can reclassify them.

 

For sure. That scorecard Trump is holding where he just shot an 82 at Doral? Classified! Boom!

 

Yes I watched Jan 6, and the Jan 6 hearings. The bolded is my reference.

 

I get that but how could a sane person still support trump. He tried to overturn a legal election by fomenting a violent insurrection. He is truly an enemy of everything the US stands for yet people still support him. It is insane.

 

That's my point.

 

I feel like this needs to be said as the classifications discussion rolls on here. The search warrant mentioned violations of 3 laws, none of which revolve around classified material:

1. Illegally in possession of items belonging to the National Archives.
2. Obstruction of Justice, likely stemming from the June affidavit that everything had been surrendered.
3. Illegally in possession of National Defense Information--classification here is irrelevant.

 

A prescient article on the dangers of trump and national defense information from Halloween 2020. Given how scary this scenario is, I don't think the pub date is a coincidence!

Can Trump Sell U.S. National Security Secrets With Impunity?

Emphasis mine...

"For 70 years, the U.S. government has constructed the classified information system on the foundation of the president’s power and discretion. The designers of this system clearly did not have a president like Donald Trump in mind."

[snip]

"Second, Trump might claim that he declassified the information and thus definitively deemed it nonharmful to the national defense before selling it. Whether his actions in the course of selling the information constituted declassification may be hard to discern. The president’s power to declassify is sweeping. But disclosing the information in exchange for money or a promise of future benefit might be seen as evidence that the secret information remains important to the national defense—because otherwise it would lack value.

Once Trump leaves office, his criminal exposure for selling secrets broadens. He no longer controls what is and isn’t classified, and the plain statement canon almost certainly does not apply to former presidents for nonofficial acts. Setting aside the vagueness and related challenges that invariably arise in these cases, it appears that the statutes would apply to the hypothesized actions by a former President Trump. (For an explanation of why these statutes apply to mere “oral transmissions” of national defense information, see this case at pages 613-18.)

Of course, it might be difficult to monitor Trump’s sale of national security secrets. As Graff anticipates, Trump might not be stupid enough to make straight-up cash-for-information deals. Rather, foreign governments and interests might bet that giving former President Trump a large consulting fee would lead to the casual revelation of important secrets during the course of dinner, meals, golf outings and the like. One can already anticipate the tricky and novel issues the National Security Agency might face when its normal practice of foreign intelligence intercepts implicates the dubious actions of an ex-president."

LIV anyone?


Can Trump Sell U.S. National Security Secrets With Impunity?

 

I don't know why you got 3 come on mans for this post. There have been countless incidents where Trump extremists have threatened government and law enforcement officials and their families. And we just had an extremist killed after trying to force his way into an FBI office.

 

If they still had classification marks on them indicating Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret, they are not unclassified. If a document is unclassified, the markings on the top and bottom of the page will say “Unclassified”. It won’t say Secret but pending declassification. There is no such thing. What you are saying is so far from what the actual rules are, I don’t know where to begin.

 

I think it’s because I implied correctly that all trumpistas are crazy. People don’t like having their insanity pointed out.

 

So calling them stupid is better than mentally ill? I don’t think they all are stupid but there is something off about anyone who is still supporting the fascist.

 

Not only that but even if the material content within it has been declassified, any document marked classified containing that declassified material still has to be handled as classified.

 

I have read that Trump's lawyer signed a statement in June saying that all classified material had been returned. Have any of you seen the actual statement? It makes little sense to me - if Trump de-classified the documents while he was still in office - that his lawyer would have said Trump returned them. Why would Trump have returned documents that he owns and were not classified? And why would Trump post the government could have come and gotten them whenever it wanted? I feel fairly confident that if Trump owned and rightfully possessed the documents at issue, his lawyer would have just told the government to buzz off from the beginning.

 

It’s a shotgun defense. They keep trying different arguments. When it gets shown as nonsense they move to the next. Everyone but the trumpistas see this.

 

This is absolutely correct. The POTUS may have the authority to declassify any document, but until the procedures to declassify the document are implemented, the document is still classified at the level called out in its header and footer.

 

Seems that way ... if what Trump is saying is true, that anything brought to his home is automatically declassified, then couldn't anyone do a FOIA request on any of those docs? What am I missing, here? The system could not have possibly worked like that, and he knows it.

 

I don't know with regard to the FOIA. I would assume that a request could conceivably be made, but it would likely be overruled by the DoD (or other governing agency).

At least to my knowledge of working with classified material, he's completely in the wrong here. But there may be additional rules here that I'm unaware of.

EDIT: The only way I can see him getting around/out of this is if he can show he took care of said classified material in a manner consistent with the document's classification (closed areas, sign logs, Sargent and Greenleaf locked cabinets, etc.) I would consider this highly unlikely.

 

Let's take trump's "anything I take from the second floor to the third floor is unclassified" nonsense one step further. How would the trump defenders feel if he just said "anything I read is unclassified"? Could you defend that as a serious standing order? It would totally break down the decades old classification apparatus.

 

I think that's a sound argument if this issue ever gets to a judge. trump may declassify at will but is a document itself classified until the it's gone through the lawful AE and Privacy Act reviews and subsequent re-markings?