Trump’s Latest Court Filing Attempts Legal Sleight of Hand
For weeks, former President Donald Trump has been raving on social media that he couldn’t possibly have mishandled Top Secret records because he’d already declassified them. Now those arguments are finally starting to make their way into his Mar-a-Lago case.
On Monday morning, Trump’s legal team filed court documents asserting that Trump had unfettered power while he was at the White House to declassify these sensitive national security records—pointing to an executive order from President Barack Obama that gave the president alone the ability to make that decision.
“The President enjoys absolute authority under the Executive Order to declassify any information,” attorneys wrote. “There is no legitimate contention that the Chief Executive’s declassification of documents requires approval of bureaucratic components of the executive branch.”