Florida State Seminoles

[hedge]

Alright, having classified documents in your possession is bad again!

[hedge]

[innocentbystander]

I don't see what the big deal is.

A President is entirely and ALWAYS authorized to see each and every classified document. Moreover, a President is entirely and ALWAYS authorized to DE-classify any classified documents that he sees. I didn't care when Trump did it and I don't care now. But at least I am consistent (unlike some of you guys here, who are just political.)

Hunter is still an asshole and Biden still needs to let the whole world know what he did for his son while being VP, but expecting reasonable behavior from him is too much to expect. He is a old, feeble man.

[DooKSucks]

Obstruction of justice is a big deal, and there is a process for declassifying docs. As shocking as it may sound, your overly simplistic view appears to be wrong. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ ... -documents

[Tree]

[innocentbystander]

Obstruction of justice is a big deal, and there is a process for declassifying docs. As shocking as it may sound, your overly simplistic view appears to be wrong. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ ... -documents

bullshit

There is NO ONE who has any Constitutional authority to prevent any President of the United States from de-classifying anything they damn well please. Obstruction of justice is very subjective, very hard to prosecute from a "who is a criminal?" standpoint. Your link is just politics as usual. Shame on you.

[DooKSucks]

Where does the constitution talk about classified documents?

[innocentbystander]

Where does the constitution talk about classified documents?

It DOESN'T! That is the whole point. The Constitution (not some political entity) defines what the President can and can't do, 'legally." And nowhere in it does it say "the President must handle classified documents" such and such. So your link is rubbish.

You are just being a political partisan, that's all.

[aTm]

I agree, the President is the President. The person specifically elected by the people to decide such things. All the stupid fuckhead bureaucrats and red-tape masturbators in the executive branch work for him not the other way around short of actual law (constitutional amendments, acts of congress signed into law, etc)

[aTm]

The whole past decade is one big political farce. Every argument like this reminds of when they tried to indict Rick Perry for threatening to use his enumerated powers. The world is just full of people we’d be better off if they were dead. Lawyers and politicians and journalists. I mean we’d only lose a couple posters here, but unfortunately we’d still have Rat anyway…

[hedge]

Trump had no authority to do anything...

[innocentbystander]

and hedge is being "political" again

[innocentbystander]

The whole past decade is one big political farce. Every argument like this reminds of when they tried to indict Rick Perry for threatening to use his enumerated powers.

That is just it, they tried to indict Perry, but couldn't. If they could have, they would have. So they tried and it went nowhere. "They" have been threatening to indict Trump for everything and anything since the day he won the election back in November of 2016. Any REAL criminal action they took against Trump ended the day Mueller ended his investigation. Two "impeachments" (which are PURELY political) are not going to prevent the former President from running for re-election.

Threats are all empty.

The world is just full of people we’d be better off if they were dead. Lawyers and politicians and journalists. I mean we’d only lose a couple posters here, but unfortunately we’d still have Rat anyway…

Since the end of communism and the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is not one bloody thing that the left and the right agree on, not one thing. We had a small window there where we (as a nation, left and right) were united on Sept 11th, 2001, but that ENDED the minute we had to DEFINE exactly WHO we were supposed to be at war with. And it ended simply because of politics and how the left and the right views Islam in the 3rd world. The end.

[Jungle Rat]

She's on Kimmel right now. Fucker probably won't even ask her about it.

[DooKSucks]

I agree, the President is the President. The person specifically elected by the people to decide such things. All the stupid fuckhead bureaucrats and red-tape masturbators in the executive branch work for him not the other way around short of actual law (constitutional amendments, acts of congress signed into law, etc)

From the rather helpful link I provided out of charity:

Under a system established by presidential executive order in 2009, the president, vice president, and agency heads may designate other executive branch officials to serve as original classification authorities. These officials may classify government information if they determine that its disclosure would harm national security. There are three levels of classification, depending on the severity of the anticipated harm to national security: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Within the Secret and Top Secret categories, certain information derived from intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes may be further classified as Sensitive Compartmented Information.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/th ... nformation

.....

Information designated as Restricted Data or Formerly Restricted Data is subject to separate rules. By statute, Restricted Data may only be declassified by authorized Department of Energy officials. Although the statute is less clear on this point, it has consistently been interpreted to give the Departments of Energy and Defense sole authority to declassify Formerly Restricted Data, an interpretation enshrined in agency regulations. Neither category is eligible for “automatic” declassification. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COM ... S-1630.pdf
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/10/1045.155

......

Does the president have the authority to declassify information?

Yes and no.

In most cases, classification and declassification are exercises of the president’s authority under Article II of the Constitution to safeguard national security information. Through executive order, the president has delegated that authority to other members of the executive branch (original classification authorities, the Information Security Oversight Office, etc.), but it is fundamentally a presidential power that the president may personally exercise.

There are exceptions, however. The Constitution also provides Congress with significant authority in the area of national security. In areas where the president and Congress share power, Congress may choose to legislate in ways that limit the president’s authority. For example, because Congress has specified that only the Department of Energy may declassify certain nuclear information, the president has no authority to do so.

Notably, some of the documents the FBI retrieved from Mar-a-Lago had Formerly Restricted Data classification markings on them. Formerly Restricted Data can include information about the nuclear stockpile size, current and past locations of nuclear weapons, weapons yield information (i.e., how powerful they are), and above- or below-ground test results. Under long-standing interpretations of the Atomic Energy Act, such information may be declassified only by the Departments of Energy and Defense.

.....

One thing the president cannot do, though, is declassify information “by thinking about it” — i.e., without communicating that decision to anyone else. This conclusion follows not from any particular legal requirements but rather from the very essence of what it means to classify or declassify information. As noted above, these are two-step processes: first, an official determines whether the information requires protection, and second, the information is flagged to ensure that the protections are applied or removed. If an official claims to have classified or declassified information after taking the first step but not the second, it’s like a customer saying she ordered food at a restaurant when she has decided what she wants to eat but hasn’t told the waiter.

.....

Nor does the classification status of the documents affect Trump’s criminal liability. The Department of Justice has publicly cited three criminal statutes that might apply in this investigation. None of them require that the information be classified. The most serious charge, the Espionage Act, criminalizes mishandling of information “relating to the national defense.” Generally, judges consider classification to be strong evidence that information relates to the national defense. But unclassified or declassified information can still qualify — particularly when the declassification happened entirely outside the usual process, involving no consultation with the relevant agencies about the national security implications of removing protections.

[aTm]

I already read it once. It doesn’t really even have anything to do with the fact that the President is fundamentally the one who decides what’s classified or not, no matter how much turning the Constitution into a pretzel someone wants to do.

Trump crossed the tyrannical bureaucracy and they raided his house and screamed “Gotcha!” to the morons in the media and now everyone is having to disclose all the classified information they have laying around because really all the government and media have to do is find the crime once shown the man. But now they got the hornets stirred looking for the “crime” everywhere.

This also notwithstanding the fact that we can all surely remember all the times that they gave no fucks about insecure classified information just laying around in the past like “But her emails!” When was the last time someone actually got a slap on the wrist for anything regarding classified information? General Petraeus?

[eCat]

Snowden is like WTF? I live in Russia over this !

[innocentbystander]

I agree, the President is the President. The person specifically elected by the people to decide such things. All the stupid fuckhead bureaucrats and red-tape masturbators in the executive branch work for him not the other way around short of actual law (constitutional amendments, acts of congress signed into law, etc)

From the rather helpful link I provided out of charity:

Gosh! Boy aren't WE so fortunate to have someone like YOU posting here helping us know about the law!!!! Oh wait....

Under a system established by presidential executive order in 2009

Neither Trump NOR Biden are criminally responsible for violating any SYSTEMS that Obama created via "Executive Order" while he was in authority. Obama may have been your god, but he was not Moses the Law Giver, counsellor. That is (and will always be) Legislature. The Supreme Court finally came to realize that last year when they overturned their own ruling from 1973 since they can't create laws either. It just took them 49 years to go and undo what they did since what they did was un-Constitutional.

Information designated as Restricted Data or Formerly Restricted Data is subject to separate rules. By statute, Restricted Data may only be declassified by authorized Department of Energy officials

Says ONLY POTUS Obama. Not "the law." Not "the Constitution." So, everything else in your rather charitable link, is hooey. And you know it.

You are just being political counsellor. You looked the other way with all the emails, looking the other way with Biden right now, but Trump is a monster who needs to be prosecuted because he plays for the team that you don't want to win. That's all.

[eCat]

not a McCarthy fan

but I think anyone would have to respect this answer

[hedge]

Isn't Marjorie "Jewish Space Lasers" Taylor Green on the Intel committee?