Former President Donald Trump has not presented any evidence showing he went through “the process” of declassifying documents at the center of a Justice Department investigation, a top House Democrat declared on Sunday.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) made the point nearly a week after an FBI raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort touched off a firestorm over national security.
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“The president has broad declassification authority when he is in office, but typically, a declassification is memorialized in some way. Can you seek out the answer to the question of whether there actually is record of whether Donald Trump declassified that? That’s his defense here, that anything he had, he had already declassified,” Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan said on CBS.
“Yes, we should determine, you know, whether there was any effort during the presidency to go through the process of declassification,” Schiff replied. “I’ve seen no evidence of that, nor have they presented any evidence of that. The idea, first of all, a former president has no declassification authority. And the idea that 18 months after the fact, Donald Trump could simply announce, ‘Well, I’m retroactively declassifying, or whatever I took home had the effect of declassifying them,’ is absurd.”
In a post to his Truth Social social media platform on Friday, Trump claimed a “standing order” allowed him to declassify documents as soon as they left the Oval Office — an assertion met with intense skepticism by legal experts, who note there is typically a formal process to follow, including steps taken to protect sources and methods. What’s more, Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Court documents tell a different story in regards to classified materials. FBI agents recovered 11 sets of classified information, with some marked as top secret, among 20 boxes of items, during the raid on Monday, search warrant documents unsealed on Friday show. The unsealed documents also show the former president is being investigated for a potential Espionage Act violation and possible obstruction of justice.
Schiff has faced blowback from Republicans over his assertions that there was collusion or conspiracy “in plain sight” between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. And he has defended his comments when challenged after special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was unable to find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Schiff also led the Ukraine impeachment effort against Trump and is a member of the Jan. 6 committee.
Schiff suggested Trump faces legal jeopardy regardless of whether documents stowed away at Mar-a-Lago were classified or not. “Nonetheless, the statutes the Justice Department are asserting in the search warrant, don’t even require that they still be classified. If they would be damaging to national security, it’s a problem. It’s a major problem,” he said.
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He’s also taking action. Schiff, along with House Oversight Chairman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), sent a letter on Saturday to the director of national intelligence asking for a national security damage assessment of the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago. As Congress learns more, Schiff said on Friday lawmakers will “responsibly discharge our oversight responsibilities.”
However, when it comes to criminal liability, Schiff stressed that is a “matter best left to the Department of Justice, and I have confidence they will pursue their investigation according to the law.”
