Former President Donald Trump was more of a threat than anyone realized because he was too clueless to believe he could declassify top secret documents with his mind and put the nation’s security at risk, Rep. Adam Schiff (D -Caliph). .) said Sunday.
CNN’s Jake Tapper played a clip on “State of the Union” of Trump insisting earlier this week to Sean Hannity that he could declassify anything just by saying it, even just “thinking about it.”
“Is that how it works?” Tapper asked Schiff.
“This is no how it works,” Schiff replied. “These comments don’t demonstrate much intelligence of any kind. If you could simply declassify it by thinking about it, then frankly, if that’s their view, it’s even more dangerous than we might have thought,” he told Tapper.
Experts have warned that distributing or deleting information about the identities of spies or the location and details of weapons systems could cost countless lives. However, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, told the Washington Post that the former president despised the secrecy shield and did not understand its importance.
“His sense was that people who are in the intelligence business are incompetent and he knew better,” Kelly told the Post. “I didn’t believe in the ranking system.”
People are “working hard” to get important information, said Schiff, who is on the House panel investigating last year’s Jan. 6 insurgency.
“People put their lives on the line to get this information. This information protects American lives. And to treat it with such cavalierness shows both the continued danger that man is, as well as the low regard that he is out for nothing but himself,” the lawmaker added.
In Trump’s view, he could “just write down anything that he read in a daily presidential briefing or anything that the director of the CIA reported to a visiting Russian delegation … and just say, ‘Well, I thought about it and therefore, when the words came out of my mouth, they were declassified,” Schiff scoffed.
A process is required to declassify documents. It cannot be done in secret because multiple federal departments and officials would need to be informed to treat the material differently. On the one hand, the records would be accessible to the Freedom of Information Act and other requests for records by the press and the public, said the former national security adviser of the Trump administration, John Bolton.
So far, only Kash Patel, a QAnon disciple and former Trump administration Defense Department aide, has backed Trump’s claim that he had a “standing order” to declassify everything taken from the White House at Mar-a-Lago.
Court-appointed special master Raymond Dearie, who is reviewing records seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago, has challenged Trump’s lawyers to show that any of the documents marked “classified” had been in any way declassified by Trump.
Schiff also complained to Tapper on Sunday that the Justice Department was too slow to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising.
