Donald Trump and his crew can’t seem to get their story straight when it comes to the boxes of classified information removed from his Mar-a-Lago resort residence last week by the FBI.
As David Reiss, a consultant with the WSJ, CNN, USA Today and others comically noted (calling it “Schrodinger’s Treason”), it seems to be one of those times “when you didn’t take, accidentally took, innocently used, declassified and then took, took and then declassified, the documents that you never took and were illicitly planted in your house by the FBI – all simultaneously.”
After a lengthy back and forth among Trump and his allies in politics and the media that resembles the above tweet, they seem to have settled on the defense that the sensitive White House documents he brought with him to his Florida residence had been declassified.
Legal and presidential record experts, as well as the FBI and DOJ, apparently are skeptical of that claim, and Trump could indeed be facing serious legal ramifications for it.
Charles Stinson, a formal federal prosecutor and senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation says “As the facts stand now, his defense would be, ‘I declassified those documents. I am not therefore in possession of classified documents now.'”
Some in Trump’s world say that no president, current or former, is bound by the removal and retention rules governing classified information, because they can be declassified by the president saying that they are. That’s the defense taken by Ric Grenell, Trump’s acting director of national intelligence and who handled lots of highly classified information while Trump was still in office.
“There is no approval process for the president of the United States to declassify intelligence. There is this phony idea that he must provide notification for declassification but that’s just silly. Who is he supposed to notify? I think it’s the height of swampism to think the president should seek bureaucrats’ approval.”
“It was all declassified,” Trump himself wrote on his Truth Social platform.
MSNBC’s Michael Cohen wrote an opinion piece describing all the hypocritical and insane ways Republicans have rushed to defend Trump:
Without evidence, Trump’s supporters have accused the leadership of the Justice Department and FBI of engaging in a political vendetta against Trump and planting incriminating evidence at his home. They’ve called for defunding the FBI, impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland and used inflammatory language, such as suggesting that the search was an act of “war” against Trump.
But the words of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., are perhaps the most chilling:
“If the FBI can raid a U.S. President, imagine what they can do to you.”
On the surface, this might sound anodyne. But the implications of what Stefanik is suggesting are frightening: Anybody who is or has been president of the United States should never be investigated for a crime.
While the congresswoman is obliquely making the argument that Trump is above the law, others are saying it more directly. In The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, columnist Dan Henninger said the quiet part loud:
“You can hate Donald Trump until your eyes pop out, but let us be clear: He was elected the 45th president of the U.S. He served four years in office. No former president who was disliked by many — not Clinton, Reagan nor FDR — had his home invaded by a squad of FBI agents. This should never happen in the U.S. End of discussion.”
Few Republicans are making the argument as directly as Henninger, but the manner in which they are defending Trump leaves little doubt that their allegiance lies with him and not the rule of law.
Cohen goes on to point out how Republicans like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who often led chants of “Lock her up!” in reference to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, hypocritically tweeted:
“After taking power they first put their political rivals in jail or forced exile (an indirect reference, it seems, to those arrested for their actions on Jan. 6, 2021). Then when the supporters of your rivals protest, you label them dangerous & criminalize opposition.”
Of course, all of this, including Trump’s claims he declassified the information, goes against his other claim that the FBI were planting illegal documents during the search. “Planting information anyone?” Trump said Friday in another social media post after the FBI did not allow his attorneys to witness the search.
So, one of those times when you declassified the documents that you took, didn’t take, were planted, or whatever the next Trump excuse for treason happens to be.
