The Removal-of-Classified-Documents Hoax
The Radical Left’s fanatical hatred of Donald J. Trump truly knows no bounds. Back in early 2016, some Leftist elements cheered his nomination for President by the Republican Party because they believed he had no chance of winning the White House. When that was proven false by Trump’s overwhelming Electoral College victory in November 2016, the Radical Left with the aid of senior officials in the CIA and FBI engineered a series of hoaxes and frauds to destabilize the Trump Administration, beginning with the trap FBI Director James Comey laid for National Security Advisor Michael Flynn very early in 2017 and continuing on with the Russian Collusion Hoax and various other frauds and deceptions.
The Radical Left recognized in advance that the chances of convicting Trump in the United States Senate were no greater than zero (a two-thirds vote of the Senate is required to convict), but nonetheless proceeded with not one but two impeachments. This was truly a bad faith use of the U.S. Constitution’s impeachment provisions, akin to a prosecutor’s use of a grand jury to indict an individual when the prosecutor well knew in advance that no jury in the United States would ever vote to convict the prosecutor’s target.
Biden’s suspicious victory over Donald Trump in 2020 gave the Radical Left the opportunity to weaponize the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the FBI against Trump, and it wasted no time in doing so. The latest travesty, on par with the Russian Collusion Hoax, is Trump’s indictment last week in the Southern District of Florida with respect to allegedly classified documents he took with him to Mar-A-Lago when he left the White House. The prosecutor in the case, Jack “Show Me the Man and I’ll Find You the Crime” Smith, found an Obama-appointed federal district judge in the District of Columbia who was willing to throw the long-established rule of attorney-client privilege out the window on the contrived and bogus theory that Trump used the assistance of an attorney to further a crime. Smith was then able to violate sacrosanct attorney-client privilege and to extract purported evidence from Trump’s attorneys. Gee whiz, one might have thought that people in the United States are legally presumed to be innocent until proven guilty by a jury of their peers — except when it comes to Donald Trump.
The 49-page indictment concocted by the weaponized and corrupt DOJ against Trump accuses him of retaining classified documents after departing the White House and blocking government efforts to retrieve them. Thus, the entire premise of what may end up being a Stalinist political show trial is that Trump removed classified documents — not documents that were de-classified by him — from the White House.
Applicable law gives a President the power to declassify any document. What is critically important in this case is that the law doesn’t specify the method by which such declassification occurs. There is no requirement of a written document personally signed by the President in wet ink with ribbons attached and bearing the White House logo. The existence of the military operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden was classified information, but President Obama declassified it (and was fully within his power when he did so) by going on national television and delivering a brief speech on the raid.
Trump has contended that he had the power to de-classify documents simply by thinking about it, but there is no need to go to this length because centuries-old Anglo-American jurisprudence is clear that legally effective and binding actions can occur without any formal documentation whatsoever. Indeed, millions of such actions occur each and every day in the United States.
A legally-binding contract requires an offer and an acceptance. When you go to a grocery store, you will see various groceries offered for sale by the store at a price that may be fixed or variable (such as $4.99 for each pound of cherries). A customer accepts the offer by placing the grocery item on the conveyor belt in front of the store’s cashier and then paying for it. All of this occurs without any formal document or even the uttering of any words. The law would say in this situation that the customer accepted the grocery store’s offer by performance: namely, taking the item to the cashier’s counter and paying for it.
In a similar way, President Trump declassified the documents taken with him to Mar-A-Lago by the performance of taking them with him when he left the White House. This was just as President Obama declassified information on the Osama bin Laden raid by going on national television and giving a speech on it. Obama declassified the documents by perfomance: a nationally televised speech. If it is true that some of the documents Trump took with him contain highly-sensitive and secret defense information, that may be an objection to the wisdom of declassifying those documents, but it does not in any way affect the declassification itself. If Congress wishes to limit a President’s authority to de-classify documents in the case of sensitive defense-related information, it can pass a bill to that effect but until it does so a President’s authority to declassify would appear to be unbounded.
