No, Trump did not have the power to declassify nuclear documents: Donald Trump has long claimed that he gave a “standing order” to declassify all documents he took with him after leaving the presidency, but experts say he especially lacked the power to do so when it came to a document related to nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump Has No Clue
Ever since Mar-a-Lago was first raided last year, former President Donald Trump has claimed he gave a standing order to declassify all documents that he took with him to Mar-a-Lago after he left the presidency.
Trump has said that he declassified all of the documents, even though there is no order in place showing that he ever did so.
Most experts have stated that that’s not the way it works, and the Justice Department and grand jury seem to have agreed, indicting Trump on 37 counts.
According to Reuters, this was especially the case with one particular document, and one particular count in the indictment.
That’s a reference to one “ U.S. nuclear weapons-related document” that is referenced in the indictment. According to the report, such a document can only be declassified “through a process that by the statute involves the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.”
“The claim that he (Trump) could have declassified it is not relevant in the case of the nuclear weapons information because it was not classified by executive order but by law,” Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, told Reuters.
“The statute is very clear. There’s nothing that says the president can make that decision,” an anonymous former national security official told the news agency.
The New Yorker, over the weekend, looked at Trump’s defense more broadly.
“The President enjoys unconstrained authority to make decisions regarding disposal of documents,” Trump said in a speech at Bedminster on the day he pled not guilty last week.
That story also implied that Trump’s overall defense is very weak.
“Trump’s retention of the documents and his careless storage of them—in a club that hosted thousands of guests—appear to easily clear the bar for an Espionage Act conviction,” the analysis said. “(The obstruction-related charges also look strong: Trump does not seem to have been subtle in his box-shuffling scheme.)”
Trump appears to be relying heavily on theories propagated by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. They claim that under the Presidential Records Act, a president has a right to do whatever he wants with records from his presidency.
This, however, is very much not true.
“On the contrary, the former President had absolutely no right to have taken any presidential records with him to Mar A Lago,” Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives Records Administration, told the Associated Press last week.
Judicial Watch, in 2012, had sued to gain access to recordings made by former President Bill Clinton, of interviews he conducted with an historian. That case had nothing to do with criminal allegations or even classified material, it was instead over whether those recordings were considered public records.
Clinton won that case and Judicial Watch lost, but the case has virtually nothing to do with what Trump is accused of doing.
“The Clinton materials were audiotapes of conversations with a historian that incidentally recorded some calls on official business,” Peter Margulies, a professor at Roger Williams University’s School of Law, said in last week’s Associated Press story. “In contrast, the documents that Trump kept were all presidential records from the moment they arrived at the Oval Office from other parts of the government.”
“That case did not involve agency records — much less classified reporting by the government’s intelligence agencies,” Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review of the Judicial Watch claims. “It involved nonclassified tape recordings that President Clinton made with historian Taylor Branch in anticipation of compiling a history of his presidency.
Expertise and Experience:
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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