Disgraced, failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump has a new excuse for why he violated the law by hoarding thousands of classified and top secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida: He telepathically declassified all of them with his mind, “by thinking about it.”
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Wednesday evening, Trump was asked:
“A president has the power to declassify. You have said on Truth Social a number of times you did declassify. Is there a process? What was your process?”
The ex-president replied:
“There doesn’t have to be a process as I understand it. If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, ‘It’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it. And there doesn’t have to be a process. There can be a process but there doesn’t have to be. You’re the president. You make that decision. So when you send it, it’s declassified. I declassified everything.”
That is complete and total bullshit, as former White House counsel for ethics Norm Eisen noted on CNN:
“There’s no indication that Trump actually ever declassified these documents. The reason [Trump’s] lawyers have never said in a court filing that the documents were declassified is because they would be subject to penalties themselves, ethics penalties, penalties of the court if they said something that isn’t true.”
And former Trump White House communications director Stephanie Grisham explained that there is indeed a process for declassifying the sort of materials Trump had in his possession:
“You don’t just say the words, ‘These are now declassified,’ and it’s done. There is a process. And more importantly, people, agencies would need to be told. The CIA, the DOJ, the FBI, the people who have sources and methods out there. They would need to know that, ‘Hey, these documents are suddenly declassified,’ so that they can move those sources around.”
Twitter users had some thoughts on the idea of using mental telepathy to change things from top secret to copacetic.
