Federal authorities at both the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have confirmed they have no record of a standing order to declassify originating with Trump that would have covered the government documents that were recovered from him after he left the presidency.
The confirmation from those federal teams means that a potentially key defense from the ex-president’s corner amid his criminal case over harboring those materials has turned out to be essentially confirmed bunk, considering these are the federal departments/teams and personnel who’d have been privy to such a declassification order from Donald if it actually existed, as best can be told. Officials confirmed the lack of documentation indicating such was present in the context of a lawsuit from Bloomberg News under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Separately, Trump has essentially himself confirmed there was no standing order to declassify the docs that he was harboring, considering there’s an audio recording in which he seems to explicitly agree that removing any remaining protections on certain docs he had was something that would still need to be done. Defenses for Donald from his Republican allies have been frankly absurd, including the notion that his assertion on that tape (from 2021) that he could’ve taken declassification action as president didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t do so, but the context makes it seemingly abundantly clear that the reference points for the conversation were lingering classification protections. What, was he just opining on the philosophy of classification?
As for Bloomberg’s records lawsuit, the “government was compelled to make the disclosure about the standing order after a judge in a similar case in Massachusetts ordered the agencies to say whether the standing order or records referencing it exist,” according to the news website. Trump himself has previously used the defense of claiming the documents he had were declassified, though that’s never even been the investigation’s linchpin. For essentially this whole time, the possibility of serious obstruction has also been an issue — and Trump’s now charged for that too. Read more at this link.
