As I said before, I had my Secret designation. I had access to some military documents in order to do my job. The documents were labelled Secret, documents labelled Secret that were declassified have markings similar to the following.
This is a fun one. "Sanitized Copy Approved For Release" in 2009. About the Russians deciding which Western vacuum tubes they want to copy.
If Trump declassifies a document it has to be written down somewhere that it is declassified and people have to go through the process of unclassifying something.
Declassification
More fun.
What Did Trump Declassify?
For better or worse, Trump’s account of his declassification authority while president isn’t entirely off base. The classification system that protects most government secrets is, in fact, a product of executive order and thus can be amended by the president.
The most recent such order,
Executive Order 13526, spells out detailed criteria and procedures for both classification and declassification and doesn’t give the president any direct role in the latter. Nonetheless, other presidents have directed declassification on occasion, as President Biden recently did for
certain information relating to the Sept. 11 attacks. A president can also amend the rules and procedures governing declassification as he sees fit. There is thus little reason to doubt that, if Trump had wanted to declassify the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago while he was president, he almost certainly could have done so.
The more difficult question is whether Trump actually took such a step. There are
well-established procedures in place for declassification, none of which Trump appears to have pursued. Nor did Trump take any administrative steps to change or install exceptions to these rules. He also failed to issue any memorandum or executive order directing declassification, as he did in
other cases through the very end of his presidency. Indeed, at present, Trump does not appear to have memorialized whatever declassification decision he may have made in any meaningful outside way. His own former national security adviser, John Bolton, has
stated, “I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in [or after],” and has described Trump’s assertion that he had a standing order to declassify documents as “almost certainly a lie.”
The closest that Trump and his supporters have come to tying the documents at Mar-a-Lago to an official declassification decision has been to link them to a
memorandum declassifying various documents related to the Russiagate scandal that Trump issued on Jan. 19, 2021, just before he left office. But that directive is quite explicit that it applies only to materials within a single “binder of materials” that had been provided to the White House as part of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation—not the multiple boxes of classified information removed from Mar-a-Lago, which reportedly cover a much broader range of topics. Former Trump adviser
Kash Patel has also argued that Trump pursued a wave of declassifications related to various conspiracy theories in the closing days of his presidency and suggested that these may include the various records held at Mar-a-Lago. But there is no more evidence of these orders than the standing order Trump described in his statement.
The absence of any contemporaneous evidence of a declassification decision is a problem for Trump, whether he and his supporters acknowledge it or not. Trump’s failure to communicate any declassification decision to the rest of the federal government means that it still considers the documents in question to be classified—a fact that it seems to have communicated clearly to Trump and his associates during the months-long negotiations over the return of the documents that preceded the FBI’s search. If the question of classification were ever to become an issue at trial, Trump and his associates would be
hard-pressed to rebut the incumbent president’s position without some evidence that Trump took steps to meaningfully declassify the records while president. Even if Trump can show that he gave some characteristic informal or verbal instruction regarding declassification, his own White House has
previously disclaimed the idea that such utterances were intended to direct declassification if not followed up on through more conventional procedures, bringing their effect into serious doubt.
No, not really.
www.lawfareblog.com
So, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound? Seems that a paper train is needed in the declassification process. Unless Trump conjures one up he may have trouble with the law.