Former US President Donald Trump has stated that all the documents that were seized from his estate at Mar-a-Lago had already been declassified by him. Trump’s office has claimed that all documents “removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them”. 

Notably, Trump himself signed an order in 2018 which ramped up the penalty for “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material” from one to five years of imprisonment. Ric Grenell, who was the national intelligence’s acting director in the Trump administration said that there is no set process by which a president can declassify documents. According to Grenell, a president can declassify a document just by saying so.

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Grenell also stated, “There is this phony idea that he must provide notification for declassification but that’s just silly. Who is he supposed to notify? I think it’s the height of swampism to think the president should seek bureaucrats’ approval”.

A Washington Post article published in 2017 stated that Trump had shared sensitive and classified matters of national security intelligence with Russia. However, according to a Supreme Court ruling from 1988, Department of Navy v. Egan, “[The president’s] authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the president and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant”.

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However, there are many detractors who believe Trump’s process was not right. Richard Immerman, national intelligence deputy director of the Obama administration, said, “There has to be a formal process. That’s the only way the system can work”. According to Immerman, “I’ve seen thousands of declassified documents. They’re all marked ‘declassified’ with the date they were declassified”. Notably, archivist David S. Ferriero revealed that many boxes containing documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago were marked as “classified national security information”.

A former Trump aide who spoke to NBC News said that Trump was not bothered with following the required protocol, “We’ve told him there’s a process and not following it could be a problem but he didn’t care because he thinks this stuff is dumb”. He added, “His attitude is that he is the president. He is in charge of the country and therefore national security. So he decides.”