Presidents do have substantial powers to declassify information. But ex-presidents do not. And there is so far no clear evidence of any process undertaken by Trump to officially declassify the documents when he was in office. And even if the material was declassified, possible lax storage arrangements at his residence could still have posed a national security threat. Furthermore, none of the three laws cited in the criminal warrant solely hinge on whether information was deemed to be unclassified, which may make the declassification point somewhat irrelevant anyway.
It is also unclear why an ex-President needed such information.
"What was the motivation for accumulating them, moving them to Mar-a-Lago?" James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, said on CNN's "Newsroom" on Saturday. "I don't understand what the purpose was. I mean, you know, the imagination can run wild here as to what the potential purpose or motivations might have been."
No comments :
Post a Comment
ANONYMOUS COMMENTS WILL NOT BE POSTED!
please use either your real name or a pseudonym.