Trump's lawyers are arguing that he had the power to declassify those documents, but notably stopped short of arguing that the former president actually did.
there, MAGA allies have defended the former president on the grounds that any records in his possession were fine for him to have anyway. Kash Patel, a lawyer who made his way up the ranks at military and spy offices during the Trump administration, put it simply when he told Fox News last month that the president “can literally stand over a set of documents and say, ‘These are now declassified.’”
However, in reality, a president’s formal decision to declassify a particular set of national security documents is actually just the first step in a bureaucratic process. The government agency that initially marked a record as “confidential,” “secret,” or “top secret” has to go back and relabel that record. And the assertion that Trump simply waved his hand and made it so has been hotly debated by national security lawyers.“Lucky I Declassified!” Trump posted last week.U.S.
’s recent decision to halt the FBI investigation and have a so-called “special master” oversee the review of documents marked classified. However, the court filing narrowly avoids saying how and when Trump supposedly declassified these records. Instead, it just asserts the general idea that a president has that power, something that few would argue against.
“The Government does not contest—indeed, it concedes—that the President has broad authority governing classification of, and access to, classified documents,” his lawyers wrote. The move could be seen as a ploy to get federal prosecutors in the impossible position of having to prove a negative, essentially saying: You can’t demonstrate that TrumpOr it could just be a ploy to appease Trump, to show the former president that his lawyers are advancing arguments that he declassified the documents even when his lawyers are actually avoiding those arguments.