I am still waiting for Wm to answer the question: Where did Trump get the power to declassify? Where in the Constitution?
the question you should ask is where classification came from. It is not easily pulled out of the Constitution because it is an Executive-level action solely created and maintained by the President's branch of government. No other branch really enters in to it. Other branches may have secret papers, but that is philosophically unwarranted. The Legislative and Judicial are pledged to be transparent for the people, and the Executive handles the implementation of that legality. If Schumer or Pelosi have something secret they don't wish to be revealed they are probably in violation of some law. Remember they are supposed to be open, and vote on laws for the Executive to implement.
We now think we kn ow why the FBI was so desperate to raid Mar-A-Lago.
Fron Newsmax: "President Trump has now admitted what he expected from the ‘swamp’ or administrative state, who would be likely to destroy the very documents that exonerated him in the highly political Russia probe of his candidacy, campaign, and presidency.
Trump indicated that he didn’t trust the new Biden administration, so he rushed to declassify important documents in his final days as president,
And he was, of course, met with massive resistance from the DC insiders, who refused to respect his authority as President and carry out his executive orders."
Those reports were confirmed by other media sources.
“Trump, believing the documents would expose a “Deep State” plot against him, told several people that he was concerned that incoming President Joe Biden’s administration would “shred,” bury, or destroy “the evidence,” Rolling Stone reported Wednesday.
Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows worked to declassify information right up to when Biden took the oath of office, Rolling Stone reported.
But the Federal government worked hard to resist Trump and made a mess out of declassifying his documents, thereby leaving a bizarre loophole open for the Biden administration to exploit with abuse of power."
Rolling Stone reported one month after FBI agents raided Trump’s Florida looking for ’11 sets of classified documents” that the DOJ had probable cause to conduct the search based on possible Espionage Act violations.
Trump and his legal team have insisted that the documents were declassified.
“I think they thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” Trump told Newsmax in a Sept. 1 interview.
Federal Judge Orders Biden Admin to Hand Over ‘Misinformation’ Emails From Fauci, Jean-Pierre
“They were afraid that things were in there — part of their scam material,” he said.
John Ratcliffe, a former U.S. congressman from Texas whom Trump tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, told Fox News last week that the bureau “didn’t find what they were looking” for, based on his observations.
“I was a former federal prosecutor, United States attorney. Let me tell you what this is about. Good prosecutors with good cases play it straight. They don’t need to play games,” Ratcliffe said, in reference to Justice Department officials. “They don’t need to shop for judges, they don’t need to leak intelligence that may or may not exist.”
The Justice Department’s arguments against having a federal court appoint a special master to review allegedly classified documents “tells you that the government didn’t find what they were looking for,” Ratcliffe continued.
“There weren’t nuclear secrets” at Trump’s estate, he noted further, “and they’re trying to justify what they’ve done. They’re not playing it straight before the American people. I think that that’s going to play out.”
