[Dual1ty]

It's like no one here paid attention at all. Trump was the best thing to happen in politics.

https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1662167616243236866

No, THIS was the best thing to happen in politics:

[Dr Van Nostrand]

It's like no one here paid attention at all. Trump was the best thing to happen in politics.

https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1662167616243236866

Trump was the best thing to happen to North Korean and Russian politics.

Kim Jong Un really appreciated the legitimacy Trump gave his oppressive dictatorship.
Putin enjoyed Trump's support of Russian expansion in Europe.

For America and any idiot who gave Trump money, not so much.

[Lord Dave]

It's like no one here paid attention at all. Trump was the best thing to happen in politics.

https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1662167616243236866

??
The same Foreign Policy where a giant novalty card about how great he is, convinced Trump to give Kim Jong Un whatever he wanted while getting nothing in return?

[honk]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/25/trump-classified-documents-mar-a-lago/

[Lord Dave]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/25/trump-classified-documents-mar-a-lago/

This is all perfectly normal, legal, and safe.  As a document storage place, you need emergency drills to move top secret dociments to a more secure location in the event of invasion.  Its like a fire drill, really.  So its a good thing that Trump is showing the dedication and responsibility necessary to have classified documents at his home.  Did Biden do that?  No.  He had them in a garage where no one even knew they were there! 

[Lord Dave]

So apparently Trump's day 1 promise is to invalidate the constitution with an executive order.


So.... Fun!

[Dr Van Nostrand]

So apparently Trump's day 1 promise is to invalidate the constitution with an executive order.


So.... Fun!

The scary part is that his mindless followers love that shit and will give their lives for it. It could win the Republican nomination.

[beardo]

Trump just can't stop winning.

[Roundy]

Trump just can't stop whining.

Yeah, he's the world's oldest crybaby.

[AATW]

So much winning

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65852062

[Lord Dave]

He'll drag it out as much as possible.

And sadly, the argument of indicting the lead candidate is one that will resonate.

[Dual1ty]

More emotional investment in Trump is a win for the social engineers.

[markjo]

So much winning

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65852062

Just a reminder of what Trump said about protecting classified information during the 2016 campaign.


Now he really needs to get elected so that he can pardon himself.

[honk]

More damning details:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-justice-department-indictment-classified-documents-miami-8315a5b23c18f27083ed64eef21efff3

[markjo]

Here is the full text of the indictment:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23839625-trump-indictment

[Lord Dave]

Tom will deny these are real/incontext/illegal.

[Tom Bishop]

I'm pretty sure we went over this last year. There is no law which describes limits to, or even a procedure for, the declassification powers of a president. If a president wants to drop off classified papers at a little old widow's house in Kansas, who does not have security clearance, and imply that this is the appropriate spot for them, he has the power to do that. In the past presidents have given people top secret clearance on the spot by motioning them into classified briefings.

Trump was president when he moved the papers to Mar-a-Lago, therefore this is the appropriate spot for those papers. Notice that the document Markjo linked does not actually cite any laws on what a president can and can't do with classified materials. It has been said that there are no laws because the chief executive is the body from which the very nature of classification originates. The executive is classifying the material, and so the executive has all power over the nature of classification.

The document tries to avoid admitting that a president with unlimited declassification power gave those papers to himself, deciding that he should have them even after he knew he would no longer be president.

[Lord Dave]

I'm pretty sure we went over this last year. There is no law which describes limits to, or even a procedure for, the declassification powers of a president.

Except there are.

If a president wants to drop off classified papers at a little old widow's house in Kansas, who does not have security clearance, and imply that this is the appropriate spot for them, he has the power to do that. In the past presidents have given people top secret clearance on the spot by motioning them into classified briefings.

No.  He CAN but he'll be in violation of the espionage act.  See, there is a process and unless that process for declassification can be followed, the validity of the declassification is invalid.

Trump was president when he moved the papers to Mar-a-Lago, therefore this is the appropriate spot for those papers. Notice that the document Markjo linked does not actually cite any laws on what a president can and can't do with classified materials. It has been said that there are no laws because the chief executive is the body from which the very nature of classification originates. The executive is classifying the material, and so the executive has all power over the nature of classification.

The document tries to avoid admitting that a president with unlimited declassification power gave those papers to himself, deciding that he should have them even after he knew he would no longer be president.

He does not have unlimited power.  And what proof do we have that he declassified anything?  We don't.  He even admits that he is showing writers and staffers classified documents he's not allowed to show.  Why would he say that if he declassified them?

[AATW]

More damning details:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-justice-department-indictment-classified-documents-miami-8315a5b23c18f27083ed64eef21efff3

I quite enjoyed this sentence

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami

Sigh…

How did we end up with people in positions of power who are so clearly unfit for high office. It’s no better over here where Boris Johnson was hounded out of office despite clinging on like a limpet for a ridiculous amount of time. And now he’s had to resign as an MP amid a Trumpian rant about it all being a witch hunt.

[Tom Bishop]

The Espionage Act violations are for people who shouldn't have sensitive material. The problem here is that a President of the United States knowingly put the materials there in Mar-a-Lago for a former president to keep. This makes it legitimate for Trump to have the papers there, by intent of a US President.

Even Politifact agrees that the president adheres to no process for declassification:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/may/16/james-risch/does-president-have-ability-declassify-anything-an/

Does the president have 'the ability to declassify anything at any time'?

The blockbuster article in The Washington Post saying President Donald Trump had "revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting" didn’t just put the White House on the defensive. It also put Republican lawmakers in a tight spot.

One of the members of Congress who commented after the newspaper’s revelations was Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho. According to CNN, he told reporters, "The minute the president speaks about it to someone, he has the ability to declassify anything at any time without any process."

Is that accurate? Independent experts said Risch is on target concerning the legal powers of the president. Some experts added, however, that the senator’s formulation left out some context that is relevant for assessing Trump’s alleged actions.

The president’s classification and declassification powers are broad

Experts agreed that the president, as commander in chief, is ultimately responsible for classification and declassification. When people lower in the chain of command handle classification and declassification duties — which is usually how it’s done — it’s because they have been delegated to do so by the president directly, or by an appointee chosen by the president.

The majority ruling in the 1988 Supreme Court case Department of Navy vs. Egan — which addressed the legal recourse of a Navy employee who had been denied a security clearance — addresses this line of authority.

"The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States’" according to Article II of the Constitution, the court’s majority wrote. "His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant."

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, said that such authority gives the president the authority to "classify and declassify at will."

In fact, Robert F. Turner, associate director of the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law, said that "if Congress were to enact a statute seeking to limit the president’s authority to classify or declassify national security information, or to prohibit him from sharing certain kinds of information with Russia, it would raise serious separation of powers constitutional issues."

The official documents governing classification and declassification stem from executive orders. But even these executive orders aren’t necessarily binding on the president. The president is not "obliged to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed," Aftergood said. "And he can change those."

Indeed, the controlling executive order has been rewritten by multiple presidents. The current version of the order was issued by President Barack Obama in 2009.

The national-security experts at the blog Lawfare wrote in the wake of the Post’s revelation that the "infamous comment" by President Richard Nixon — that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" — "is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them. The nature of the system is that the president gets to disclose what he wants."