On Friday afternoon, as the public got their first look at the search warrant and related materials from the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search, one of Donald Trump’s spokespersons issued a curious written statement. Much of it was tiresome and foolish — it described the search as a “botched raid,” for example — but it included one word that stood out as notable.
Federal law enforcement, the statement said, seized “declassified” documents. The former president started pushing the same line via his Twitter-like social media platform. By Friday night, a Trump representative was on Fox News reading a newly released statement, claiming that Trump, while in office, had a “standing order“ about declassifying sensitive materials that he brought with him to the White House residence.
Over the weekend, many of the Republican’s followers embraced the new script — conveniently tossing aside competing talking points from days earlier — without pausing to appreciate just how patently absurd it was.
Right off the bat, let’s start with the most obvious problem: Trump doesn’t appear to have done what he now claims he did. NBC News reported:
Richard Immerman, a historian and an assistant deputy director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, said that, while the president has the authority to declassify documents, there’s a formal process for doing so, and there’s no indication Trump used it. “He can’t just wave a wand and say it’s declassified,” Immerman said. “There has to be a formal process. That’s the only way the system can work,” because otherwise there would be no way of knowing who could handle or see the documents.
This need not be complicated: If Trump, while in office, had declassified the materials in question, there’d be some kind of record of it. There’s a process involving multiple departments and agencies.
The former president and his team aren’t pointing to documentation from the National Security Council or the White House counsel’s office; they’re simply asserting that materials were declassified, as if we’re supposed to take their word for it.
What’s more, as The New York Times reported, there’s a disconnect between the claim and the controversy, since the relevant criminal statutes operate separately from the executive branch’s system of classifying documents.
For one thing, two of the laws that a search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago this week referred to — Sections 1519 and 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — make the taking or concealment of government records a crime regardless of whether they had anything to do with national security. For another, laws against taking or hoarding material with restricted national-security information, which generally carry heavier penalties than theft of ordinary documents, do not always line up with whether the files are technically classified.
Finally, it would be ideal if we could all just be grown-ups about this. In the midst of a burgeoning scandal involving a former president keeping highly classified materials in his glorified country club, his operatives came up with a post-hoc rationalization they would’ve presented days — and months — earlier if it were legitimate. Remember, the controversy over what Trump took to Mar-a-Lago came to the fore several months ago. A week ago today, it reached a new level when the FBI executed a search warrant to reclaim materials the former president wasn’t supposed to have. Four days later, these guys suddenly remembered a mysterious and previously undisclosed “standing order” about a declassification process for which there is no paper trail? C’mon. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s White House national security adviser for a year and a half, told the Times he’d never heard of any such “standing order,” adding that the desperate defense is “almost certainly a lie.” Another former senior administration official had no idea what Team Trump was talking about. Let this be a reminder to those scrambling to defend the former president: Team Trump is making stuff up as it goes along, leaving its allies out on a shaky limb with no support.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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