Trump is flailing about with his excuses: Neal Katyal, former Solicitor General of the US, pointed out a problem with those excuses. Trump is both claiming the FBI planted the documents, and that he declassified all the Top Secret Compartmentalized documents when he took them to his residence to study for the next day. But how could both be true? This is like a hack lawyer who claims his client was not at the scene of the crime AND the prosecution's version of the crime is incorrect. AKA flinging mud at the wall and hoping some will stick.
He also pointed out that the President can't just declassify a document for himself. It gets declassified for everybody, and has to be marked as declassified. Those documents the FBI seized were NOT marked as declassified! The copies of them in the secure storage sites are not marked as declassified either.
Then there is the ridiculous notion that Donald Trump ever "studied" anything at all. He didn't even read or listen to his daily briefings.
And then there's the fact that a lot of SIGINT and nuclear documents are "born classified", that is, classified from the moment they are written, generated, whatever. Anything that has anything to do with our nuclear weapons, nuclear readiness, reliability, placement...anything to do with our nuclear military posture whatsoever is born classified and cannot under any circumstances be summarily declassified "with a wave of the hand" even by POTUS.
For those materials, a specific review process and a great many filtering stages and several levels of oversight is required, from several agencies including DoE, NRC, DoD, DHS, and so on down the line. Presidents are not able to declassify materials of this nature on a whim.
When it comes to SIGINT, signals intelligence that is associated WITH our nuclear status, or even SIGINT related to our spies, IF a president DOES summarily "wave his hand" and declare the material declassified there is also a review process that takes place because declassifying a lot of SIGINT carries with it innumerable consequences which can gravely alter our entire global position on security and our national security itself.
During the time that my father's work focused on Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, aka "Star Wars", he was a key part of the team that developed the thermal X-Ray Laser, which some of you know as MTG's "Jewish Space Laser".
At the time he was working on it, IT was classified, knowledge of its existence was classified, and certain specifics of its design and construction were classified. The device itself was not nuclear however its purpose was supposed to be that of use AGAINST incoming nuclear devices delivered by various platforms in use by our adversaries.
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