CRUMBLING: Trump’s top criminal defense excuse for documents just vanished
After former President Donald Trump was caught with his collection of top secret classified documents, he asserted, among many other things, that he had a standing order allowing him to declassify anything. Unfortunately for Trump, however, it seems that no one has been able to find it.
It doesn’t appear to exist.
For clarification’s sake, it may exist in Donald Trump’s pointed head which is not a defense.
Last August, after the Mar-a-Lago search (Not a “raid”) turned up some of the country’s most guarded secrets, Trump’s defense claim piqued Bloomberg’s interest.
Bloomberg filed a FOIA lawsuit against the DNI and DOJ requesting a copy of this “standing order.”
Shocking no one, Bloomberg received a letter last week that confirmed that neither the DOJ nor ODNI possesses anything responsive to the request.
As Rolling Stone reports:
“Sources familiar with the matter told Rolling Stone that the FBI has begun asking former Trump administration officials whether they’ve heard of the so-called ‘standing order,’ and that feds had sent interview requests to the ex-officials, including former National Security Council personnel. After CNN asked 18 former Trump officials in August whether they knew of such an order, none mentioned having heard of it and said they believed the claim to be false.”
Such a standing order would have been one of the most utterly dangerous “orders” in existence.
It is true that a president can determine that he or she can show a classified document to whomever they like, but to actually declassify a document, it goes through the formal process to determine whether the all-important “sources or methods” might be threatened.
Lives are on the line.
It doesn’t require genius imagination to understand that a certain observation in a document could only come from one person and thus that “one person’s” life may be at risk in Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and on and on.
Similarly, the fact that a conversation was recorded would give away the country’s ability to pick up on that very conversation, resulting in a bug search or new technology.
If the United States was ever compelled to invade Iran, it’s probably best to not have the documents outlining the military’s freaking plan floating around.
Though the various three-letter agencies, CIA, NSA, etc., would never release information on what steps it took, one can be sure that upon finding out what Trump had, the agencies had to extract people from dangerous situations and probably move some technological stuff around.
As for Trump’s “defense,” even if he had declassified the documents in question, he still didn’t have the right to take them and obstructed justice during the investigation.
As a legal defense, it was always dubious. If he had such an order, why didn’t he demand that it be released immediately? And it couldn’t cover all his crimes.
But it is nice to have that issue entirely cleared up as Jack Smith continues his efforts, efforts most believe will result in additional indictments.
Oh! It is probably also worth mentioning that, given that Jack Smith is working at the FBI’s behest, he surely knew all along that no such order existed.
The proposed defense probably didn’t take up much of the prosecution’s time.
Original reporting by Charisma Madarang of Rolling Stone.
I can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com and on Twitter @JasonMiciak.
Editor’s note: This is an opinion column that solely reflects the opinions of the author.
