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Notes -
I stand by my previous sentiments:
...
Perhaps the claim that it's related to national defense will result in the prosecution attempting to actually establish that there was something there that anyone should actually care about, but I expect to be pretty disappointed.
every single one of these is information the executive is free to disclose in any manner at will
That comment was a response to skepticism that the documents were important. Your comment is a non sequitur to that conversation. Not every argument whose valence is against your side demands an argument whose valence is for your side.
my side? what side? i'll answer: it's certainly not trump's. my side is the United States' Constitution and her people. so that in mind, let me say what "does not follow" is those who participate in discussing a matter of pure constitutionality when they lack the understanding of the constitution to contribute. the only way the documents would matter is if they contained state nuclear secrets. that's how to build nukes, the nuclear capabilities of foreign states are not nuclear secrets. since that's not what the documents contained, their contents don't matter.
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A shame he isn't the executive anymore.
he was, and that makes all the difference. it's what makes the list, especially its framing, meaningless bullshit. "in any manner" includes "sending it to maralago and forgetting about it until biden was sworn in, at which point the materials automatically became declassified"
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On page 15 they have him on tape bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify the plan of attack on a foreign country.
If the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, and he doesn't know it's classified, I think it still becomes declassified in doing so. At least, that seems to be the argument. So in effect, by taking them home and keeping them past the end of his presidency, Trump declassified the materials without realizing he did so.
I mostly just find that argument amazing and I hope it wins for its own sake as an argument.
I don't think this is actually the case, in part because the rules of classification don't have to actually make sense. For example, a currently held legal position of the USG is that even if classified information is leaked in public (like, for instance, the Snowden materials or others like that), so that it is plastered on every journalistic outlet in the world, it is still "classified". I've heard stories of people seeing things marked classified a month or two after the exact thing was on the front page of NYT. The USG literally believes that, for example, if a person with a security clearance who works for the gov't, but doesn't have a need to know (or doesn't have the right level clearance or whatever), goes to a public website of a journalistic outlet and downloads classified documents, it is "spillage", and is probably theoretically intentionally mishandling classified information. Now, I think it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone is actually going to get prosecuted for downloading a copy of the Snowden documents (even folks with security clearances who signed documents essentially saying they wouldn't do this). But that's, like, the "official" view.
So, I think that if the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, it would be considered "spillage". Of course, the (sitting) president wouldn't be guilty of mishandling classified information, but the information would still be considered classified, and every member of the executive branch is supposed to treat that information with the same rules. (Of course, certain people's jobs is to analyze the effect of such spillage and what changes need to be made, but that's still within the regular rules concerning handling classified materials.)
Once we realize that we're sort of in this world where the rules are a bit made up and don't have to make so much sense, we're in a bit of a pickle and have some unfortunate choices to make. Let me actually proceed by merging these examples... suppose that Trump was being prosecuted for downloading a copy of the Snowden documents after leaving office. We have a broad statute. That broad statute sure as hell can be interpreted as making that action illegal. Yet, we sort of have good other reasons to not prosecute him (or anyone else who downloads them). Is the information still "classified"? Yeah, kinda. Is it treated sorta differently? Yeah, kinda. It's weird.
Back to the "president tells some other country something that's classified" case. Is that information still classified? I think so, and I think much more clearly so. Is it treated sorta differently? Yeah, kinda. Here, it might be a bit easier, because often, classification markings will indicate whether it's releasable to specific countries. So, for example, if the president up and told a delegation from the UK some classified information that wasn't previously classified as releasable to the UK, should the executive worker bees then proceed to mark any instance of that exact information as releasable to the UK moving forward? Hell, I don't know. It would make sense to me to do that, but the rules really are kind of made up at this point. It's not like we're going to get a statute that is on point with this level of granularity. The authority for this level of granularity likely flows from the president's power, and rules for exactly how you should handle this may be contained in executive branch documents outlining best practices... but honestly, probably isn't even there. I think this sort of situation just isn't formalized in any process document, and would probably just be a matter of norms and how various actually people in the gov't socialize the issue and feel like they should do. It probably gets to be extra tough, because if the president doesn't explicitly tell his people what his intent is, it's entirely possible that he actually desires there to be some ambiguity. Rather than having his worker bees suddenly all simultaneously start telling the UK, "Yes, this is actually true," perhaps he wants the UK to think that it might be true, but not know for sure. Then what? Sorta makes you almost lean in the other direction? But there sure as shootin' ain't gonna be an explicit statute that lays all this out in gory detail. Just the regular, broad, overarching one.
So now, the instant case. If a president takes stuff home, I doubt he's implicitly entirely declassifying it. Is he, like, implicitly marking it "releasable to former presidents"? "Releasable to former presidents, and the folks they want to share it with"? I mean, weird. I would tend toward probably not really. But the president has always been in a unique position WRT classified stuff. We're already, as shown above, in a world where the president can just sort of do shit with it, and then we're stuck trying to retcon in some set of sort of consistent rules for the worker bees to follow. And that leads us to the final insane part of the whole story. It's always been about retconning a set of rules for the worker bees. I don't know that we've ever had to even try coming up with a set of consistent rules for former presidents. At least, not to my knowledge; maybe as this drags on, we'll get some incredible historical research about how informally secret info was treated by a former president in 1840, or how Eisenhower did such-and-such after leaving office. But my sense is that most presidents tend to be happy to drift off into the distance and sort of disappear. They're fine with playing nice and giving stuff back. And the folks still in gov't aren't out to get them. So, it all just sort of works relatively smoothly, behind the scenes, informally, and no one needs to come up with their Super Consistent Set of Rules That are Still Totally Made Up for former presidents and classified info. In any event, basically all those factors are opposite here (Trump is not happy to drift off into the distance and disappear; he's not fine with playing nice and giving stuff back; the folks still in the gov't are out to get him).
That brings me to what I think is becoming my conclusion, more and more. The core conflict here is simply an incredibly vague area where there are no real rules plus a violent disagreement between Trump and the bureaucracy. This wouldn't be the first time. Hell, I came around to the idea that his entire first impeachment stood solely on the pillar that Trump disagreed with the bureaucracy about what is "in the interest of the United States", and the bureaucracy didn't take kindly to being disagreed with. Similarly, here, Trump is like, "Fuck you, there are no real rules as to what I can do with this stuff. I make the rules, even implicitly (and as such, they have implications for how things work after I leave office); your job is to figure out what you worker bees are going to do around the edges of what I do," and the bureaucracy violently disagrees.
But by those rules as you described it, wouldn't then the president taking stuff home be considered spillage in the same logic? Ie. from himself to himself? Then because - because - the president doesn't have clearance to own it anymore, he might actually paradoxically be in the clear to pass it on to journalists?
Like, he now has classified information, but he's not "forwarding classified information" because he's not in a position where he has special authority over classified information to begin with. It's just like a journalist passing a leak to another journalist. And when he had the authority to possess it, he spilled it, but that can't be a crime because, well, he had the authority to do that then. So in the journalist analogy, the president basically acts as both leaker and releaser at different points in time.
ROFL! That's a hilarious take. But I have no idea. The rules are made up, and the points don't matter.
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Better than I was expecting anyway! I'm obviously not looking for a full rehash of the details, my objection was primarily that we had absolutely no idea whether there was anything that even remotely matters. I would say that this looks like a list of things that one really shouldn't be careless with.
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I have similar sentiments.
There seem to be two consistent reasons for classification:
Military secrets.
Embarrassments.
The chance that Trump would want to take military secrets seems low to non-existent to me.
Waving them around as an example of a put-up against him by the Deep State, importantly -- this is quite different from faxing them to the Ayatollah.
Is there anything that will convince you this isn't a Deep State frameup?
What do you mean? I'm well convinced that the documents are not a frameup, in the sense that Trump took them and won't give them back -- that doesn't mean the charges against him are justified.
If you read the affidavit, you'll see that Trump is claiming that the plans were drawn by some general who expressed concern that Trump was crazy and would take the US to war with this unnamed nation -- prior to meeting with Trump, but after drawing up the plans for invading the nation himself.
That sounds like a put-up to me -- and may be why Trump was so eager to hang on to that particular document. The rest, IDK -- we don't seem to have the details. But I find it unlikely that Trump was engaged in espionage.
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It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.
How does it differ from the bathrooms of Democratic Secretaries of State?
To the best of my knowledge, Secretary Clinton didn't show anyone what she had.
Loose lips sink ships, but her lips were sealed tighter than a pickle jar.
I think it's pretty well uncontested that she had a server with a bunch of classified material literally in her bathroom? Her IT people obviously knew about it?
But they didn't tell everyone and his brother about it.
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Color me surprised.
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It is actually against the law (22 CFR 17.22) to classify information to conceal embarrassment (also to conceal violations of law). That said, I'm sure it happens, and many embarrassing facts may also be relevant to national security.
Its not so much personal embarrassments as it is National embarrassments. Anything embarrassing is also a national security concern when you have a reputation to uphold among allies. When a single manager fucks up, you fire them and throw them under the bus. When a whole organization fucks up? For years on end? You bury that shit deep.
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