Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin’s Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government, shares his insights on the controversy swirling around documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Florida home in the Washington Post blog Monkey Cage.
Andrew Rudalevige
Rudalevige, a presidential scholar with extensive scholarship in the area of executive powers, looks at what he describes as the “many, many holes in Donald Trump’s theory of executive power.”
An excerpt:
But since the FBI searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for documents —some classified—that were allegedly held illegally, Trump’s allies have added a new comic-book twist to this theory. They’re arguing that a president can declassify a document just by thinking about it. In this telling, any documents Trump brought home had been declassified just because he took them—and were therefore already in the public domain.
Indeed, the wish-based method of declassification is wishful thinking. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage’s tour of the topic quotes one expert as calling it a “logical mess” to ask whether a president can declassify information without telling anyone. Classification affects how the government handles documents. Unless agencies know a document’s classification, they can’t change how they handle it.
Other versions of the argument are not necessarily better. In one telling, during his presidency Trump issued a “standing order” that any document brought from the Oval Office to the White House residence was immediately deemed declassified. But Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton called this “a complete fiction.” And again, how would agencies be notified?
Read the Washington Post/Monkey Cage article, Presidents Can’t Declassify Documents with Green Lantern Superpowers in its entirety.
