Days after the FBI search, Trump`s office claimed that as president, he had a standing order that documents that had been “removed from the Oval Office and brought to the residence would be considered declassified by the time he removed them,” according to a statement read on Fox News by a right-wing writer the former president described as one of his representatives at the National Archives. No. An agency can automatically release its own records without verification, as long as they do not contain information from another organization. However, any document containing other actions of government agencies must be forwarded to that agency for review before being automatically declassified. Automatic release applies ONLY to permanently classified documents that have been properly referred to fairness agencies, but have not been processed by those agencies within a specified time frame. If there is no policy that recalls a decision to release information and to convey that decision to the rest of the government, the measure would have essentially no consequences. Departments and agencies would continue to treat this information as secret and, therefore, treat it as closely guarded secrets and restrict access to the records it contains. In May, the Justice Department obtained a grand jury subpoena for all sensitive documents in Trump`s possession. Its representatives returned a few, while falsely saying that there were no others left. In particular, he required all documents that “bear classification marks” — not classified documents — so the claim that the former president technically leaked them also seems irrelevant to whether he illegally resisted the subpoena. Here`s a closer look at what a president can and can`t do when it comes to removing protections from government secrets.
No. RD/FRD is classified under the Atomic Energy Act 1954, as amended, and is excluded from any provision of the regulations. Only designated officials within the Department of Energy (DOE) may publish RD/DRF records. Files containing DR/DRF will not be reviewed for disclosure of national security information until the Secretary of Energy or the Secretary of Energy, in cooperation with the Secretary of Defense, decides for the DRF that RD/DRF markings may be removed. Classified national security information contained in RD/DRF files is subject to regulation and is forwarded to DOE and other appropriate government agencies. Trump added to the confusion when he said in an interview with Fox personality Sean Hannity: “There`s no need for there to be a trial the way I understand it. If you are the president of the United States, you can simply issue the statement saying it is declassified. Even if you think about it. This question is, in the opinion of experts in the law of state secrets, bordering on inconsistency.
(b) classified information is not automatically disclosed as a result of the unauthorised disclosure of identical or similar information. Under a system introduced by presidential decree in 2009, the president, vice president and heads of agencies may designate other executive officials as initial classification authorities. These officers may classify government information if they determine that disclosure would be injurious to national security. There are three levels of classification, depending on the severity of the anticipated damage to national security: confidential, secret and top secret. In the “secret” and “top secret” categories, certain information derived from intelligence analysis sources, methods or processes may be classified as sensitive information. Second, authorities maintain confidentiality guides indicating the categories of information classified by the original privacy authorities (e.g. “names of undercover agents”). These guides can be hundreds of pages long, and there are thousands of them across the federal government. The government has two main ways to achieve this second step. Certain secrets, such as information relating to nuclear weapons, are dealt with separately under a special legal system adopted by Congress under the Atomic Energy Act. These secrets cannot be automatically disclosed by the president alone and, by law, require extensive consultation with law enforcement agencies.
The national security document classification system is largely a bureaucratic process used by the federal government to control how law enforcement officials handle information whose disclosure could harm the country. However, the government has prosecuted mismanagement and deliberate mismanagement of information. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president, as commander-in-chief, is vested with broad powers to classify and disclose this information, often through executive orders. The basic policy for the declassification of NSIs, as paraphrased in E.O. 12356, where the policy is expressed in terms of classification of information, is that NSIs may be released if their disclosure can reasonably be expected not to be injurious to national security.++ Table 11.3 compares the NSIs` declassification policy with the declassification policies previously stated for DR and FRD. Moreover, the classification status of the documents has no bearing on Trump`s criminal responsibility. The Department of Justice has publicly cited three criminal laws that may apply in this investigation. None of them require that the information be classified. The most serious charge, the Espionage Act, criminalizes the misuse of information “related to national defense.” In general, judges consider classification to be strong evidence that the information relates to national defence. But unclassified or declassified information can still qualify – especially if the disclosure took place completely outside the usual process and did not involve consultation with the relevant authorities on the national security implications of lifting protective measures.