Leftists are excited. They’ve got him now because Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, doesn’t recall Trump declassifying the documents later seized at Mar-a-Lago. In fact, that’s a big “who cares?”. Trump didn’t need to follow bureaucratic requirements to declassify anything. As the man with plenary power over national security under the Constitution, merely by taking them with him, he declassified them.

ABC News has the story:

Appearing to contradict former President Donald Trump's primary public defense in the classified documents case, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told special counsel Jack Smith's investigators that he could not recall Trump ever ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House, nor was he aware of any "standing order" from Trump authorizing the automatic declassification of materials taken out of the Oval Office, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

Ever since the FBI's seizure of more than 100 classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate last August, Trump has insisted that he declassified all the materials before he left office. 

Trump is correct. He declassified the documents by taking the documents. That’s all he needed to do.

Let me explain.

National security questions belong solely to the president. That’s not me saying that; that’s the Supreme Court saying that:

The President, after all, is the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” U.S.Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.

(See also this Supreme Court authority, along with this federal analysis.)

Given that the president is the big boss, his employee’s rules cannot constrain him. Likewise, because this authority belongs solely to the executive, Congress cannot limit it either.

The latter fact means that the Espionage Act of 1917 is irrelevant even though it is the basis for Jack Smith to assert that the documents Trump has are “vital to the defense of the security of the United States.” That’s not a decision for Jack Smith. That was a judgment call for the president of the United States—who happened to be Trump.

The same is true for the effort to control Trump under the Presidential Records Act and all the rules that the administrative state made up under the act—both the Act and the rules apply to everyone but the president. Thus, both Biden and Pence should be indicted for violating the Act when they were Vice Presidents.

Bottom line: It’s irrelevant what Meadows’s memories are. When Trump removed the documents, he declassified them. Petty rules from petty bureaucrats cannot constrain the president. Of course, just as King Kong broke free from the petty chains binding him didn’t mean that, eventually, the little minds surrounding him weren’t able to kill him.

Let me add that, if Trump’s attorneys aren’t making the plenary power argument…well, I’m at a loss as to why they’re not making that argument.

Image by Andrea Widburg