ok well now that we put the incredible hilarity aside, maybe we wont have to over that again or say lol for no reason other than to deflect.. he has very broad powers to declassify.
Question, is it smart for the defense to tell the prosecution their defense plan before trial? Is the trial over? I would also say that having the authority to do something super-cedes whether or not you know you have said power. That is why presidential power is so broad. Specifically actually. You need to make quick decisions and as president don’t need to fill out forms and shit.
Of course not...but there is a process for declassifying that information AFTER the decision is made by the President. If not, then all of the other agencies whose mission is affected by said declassified information, have no way of knowing that the information is now unclassified. This is common knowledge. It is also common knowledge that Trump never declassified those records that he took because there is no paper trail to prove it. You think Trump is A) ever take the stand in a trial? B) say out loud in a court of law that he declassified them in his mind and he didn't have to tell anyone? If so, then you are going to be sorely disappointed.
what is the point of declassifying materials if the affected agencies are not notified? We agree that the President has wide ranging authority to declassify while they are the sitting President. However, once the President makes the decision to declassify there is a process to ensure that the other parts of government, specifically the ones who originally classified the materials, must be notified that it is no longer classified or they will continue to operate under the assumption that it is still classified. Now, Trump has asserted that he could declassify simply by thinking it without telling anyone. I have heard government official after government official skoff at this argument. That said, there is no legal precedent for a President making such an argument. Partly because the very notion of it is so far fetched that no one has ever dared to make that argument before. All of this said, none of the charges against Trump in the documents case are reliant upon classification. So even if Trump managed to get the Supreme Court to rule on his novel legal theory that he can simply think it and it happens and IF he got them to support such a notion...it would have no bearing on this case whatsoever. So, our argument here is for the novelty of it, but in practice it doesn't matter to the case at hand.
https://www.americanbar.org/news/ab...es/2022/10/fact-check-presidential-authority/ Trump added to the confusion when he said in an interview with Fox personality Sean Hannity, “There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it. ... If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified. Even by thinking about it.” Most national security legal experts dismissed the former president’s suggestion that he could declassify documents simply by thinking about it. But as an ABA Legal Fact Check posted Oct. 17 explains, legal guidelines support his contention that presidents have broad authority to formally declassify most documents that are not statutorily protected, while they are in office. The system of classifying national security documents is largely a bureaucratic process used by the federal government to control how executive branch officials handle information, whose release could cause the country harm. The government has, however, prosecuted cases for both mistaken and deliberate mishandling of information. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president as commander in chief is given broad powers to classify and declassify such information, often through use of executive orders. Some secrets, such as information related to nuclear weapons, are handled separately under a specific statutory scheme that Congress has adopted under the Atomic Energy Act. Those secrets cannot be automatically declassified by the president alone and require, by law, extensive consultation with executive branch agencies. In all cases, however, a formal procedure is required so governmental agencies know with certainty what has been declassified and decisions memorialized. A federal appeals court in a 2020 Freedom of Information Act case, New York Times v. CIA, underscored that point: “Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures,” the court said. As the new ABA Legal Fact Check notes, the extent of a president’s legal authority to unilaterally declassify materials — without following formal procedures — has yet to be challenged in court.
No there isn’t. Quote me the DOD directive that details how to declassify information after Obama told the world how we killed Osama Bin Laden.
