Multiple former White House officials under Donald Trump denied the former president’s claim of a standing order that declassified all documents after they left the Oval Office during his administration.
Two senior Trump aides were part of a group of 18 administration officials who denied knowledge of the standing order, if one even existed in the first place, including former White House chiefs of staff Mick Mulvaney and John Kelly, CNN reported.
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“Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given,” Kelly told the outlet. “And I can’t imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it.”
Mulvaney stated that he was not aware of the order during his tenure, which lasted from January 2019 until March 2020, the outlet reported.
Administration officials who would have been informed of the standing order or who would take part in the declassification process scoffed at the concept, which surfaced after the FBI conducted a raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Aug. 8.
“Total nonsense,” an anonymous senior White House official told CNN. “If that’s true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and DoD, which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill.”
The process of declassifying information is more difficult than just deeming the information declassified, officials said. The process included notifying certain government agencies, including the CIA, National Security Agency, Energy Department, State Department, and Defense Department.
“I was not briefed on anything like that when I started as national security adviser,” former national security adviser John Bolton said. “I never heard of it, never saw it in operation, never knew anything about it. … If this existed, there had to be some way to memorialize it. The White House counsel had to write it down. Otherwise, how would people throughout the government know what to declassify?”
Trump made the claim in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, last week, declaring that all the documents in the 11 boxes seized during the raid had been declassified, including the documents that had been labeled top secret, which could include information about nuclear weapons.
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Trump is being investigated over claims he violated the Espionage Act, according to the search warrant that was unsealed Friday. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart additionally approved the unsealing of additional documents related to the raid, including the motion to seal the search warrant.
Reinhart teased unsealing parts of the affidavit Thursday, ordering the Justice Department to file a redacted version of the affidavit by next Thursday.
