In his own words

former President Donald Trump on his imagined total, telepathic de-classification authority.

 

DONALD TRUMP ON DE-CLASSIFICATION, SEPT 21, 2022
TV INTERVIEW WITH SEAN HANNITY

HANNITY: “Ok, was there a process, what was your process to de-class…”

TRUMP [interrupting] “There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it, and, you know, there’s different people say different things, but as I understand it, there doesn’t have to be—if you’re the president of the United States, you can de-classify just by saying ‘I’m, it’s de-classified,’ even by thinking about it, because, you’re sending it to Mar-a-lago, or wherever you’re sending it, and, there doesn’t have to be a process—there can be a process, but, there doesn’t have to be. You’re the president, you make that decision, so, when you send it, it’s de-classified. We—I de-classified EVERYTHING. Now, I de-classified things, and we were having a lot of problems with NARA—you know, NARA, uhhh, is a radical left group of people running that thing, and, when you send documents over there, I would say there’s a very good chance those documents will never be seen again. There’s also a lot of speculation, because of the severity of what they did, of the FBI coming in, raiding Mar-a-lago, were they looking for the Hillary Clinton emails, that were deleted but they are around someplace. Were they looking for spying on Trump’s—no, no, they may be saying, they may have thought that it was in there.”

Just when you think things couldn't get any more absurd. After I saw that Hannity clip, I went in and transcribed it verbatim for myself, not wanting to just rely on media reports. Unreal. Is it too early to start drinking? His lawyers are probably already bellied-up after that ill-advised verbal vomit.

If you’d like to listen to a full 19:41 of this painful Hannity stuff, click here.

BTW, Dr. Marcy Wheeler is all over the multiple Trump fiascos.

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Ugh.

 

UPDATE, ON "DECLASSIFICATION" & NATIONAL DEFENSE INFORMATION

 

 

OK, then. That strikes me as dispositive.

AS REPORTED BY RAWSTORY

During an appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) took some shots at Donald Trump and suggested he may not be smart enough to know what should be kept secret and what shouldn't.

 Speaking with host Jake Tapper, the Democrat who sits on the Jan 6 House select committee investigating the insurrection, was asked about Trump's belief that he can declassify top secret documents just by thinking about doing it.

"That’s not how it works. Those comments don’t demonstrate much intelligence of any kind. If you could simply declassify by thinking about it, then frankly, if that’s his view, he’s even more dangerous than we may have thought,” he told the host.

Continuing in that vein, the California Democrat added, "People work hard to get that information. People put their lives at risk to get that information. That information protects American lives. And for him to treat it so cavalierly shows both what a continuing danger the man is, but also how very little regard he has for anything but himself."

"He could simply spout off on anything he read in a presidential daily brief or anything that he was briefed on by the CIA director to a visiting Russian delegation or any other delegation and simply say, ‘Well, I thought about it and therefore, when the words came out of my mouth, they were declassified,"' he suggested to the CNN host.

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