The headlines are damning: Trump had national security documents or classified documents or nuclear secret documents in his possession, a clear criminal violation. One former CIA head even put out a tweet effectively saying that Trump should be executed for treason. Everyone who believes Trump committed a criminal act is wrong. These claims completely misunderstand the nature of Trump’s (indeed of every president’s) plenary power and how it plays out with respect to documents and classified information.
The left is ecstatic. The Washington Post hollered, “Trump warrant papers list 11 sets of classified documents seized.” The Atlantic assured readers that “Not Even the President Can Declassify Nuclear Secrets: Fan letters and snapshots are one matter, and launch codes are another—and here the details of classification might decide just how much trouble Trump is in.”
Michael Hayden, who served in the Air Force, and then went on to a career as a high-level government functionary—former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency—approvingly retweeted “historian” Michael Beschloss’s explicit suggestion that Trump should be executed:
That tweet establishes that brains and an understanding of our constitutional system are not a prerequisite for being either a government hack or a leftist historian.
The Democrat line is clear: Trump had classified national security documents in his possession, which is a criminal act, so he needs to be prosecuted and, preferably, executed. In fact, it is impossible for a president to mismanage classified or national security documents. Indeed, even if Biden reclassified the information, Trump still did not commit a crime. Everything the Democrats believe is dead wrong.
Image: Moving Van (edited) by SGMCA. CC BY-SA 4.0; Donald Trump (edited) by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The President of the United States has plenary power over national security issues, including document classification. That means that, under the Constitution, as to national security, the president has complete and unlimited power. He is the king of the national security world, and no one can gainsay him, whether the bureaucrats who work for him, Congress, or the Supreme Court.
Democrats, however, are pushing back against this reality. The best example I’ve found comes from Graeme Wood, an African-American studies and philosophy major, who authored the above-mentioned Atlantic article (which is currently The Atlantic’s “most popular” article.)
Wood reluctantly concedes some of the president’s unlimited power. He quotes J. William Leonard, former head of the Information Security Oversight Office, who said that “the rules and procedures governing the classification and declassification of information apply to everyone else [other than the president].” Wood continues, saying, “[The president] would not have had to file paperwork—just ‘utter the magic words,’ Leonard told me.” In other words, Wood acknowledges that Trump, while president, by packing up and taking documents with him automatically declassified them.
Wood accurately notes that Biden could have reclassified the documents. There’s no evidence, though, that he did so. In addition, even had Biden done so, that would not convert Trump into a criminal. The Constitution is extremely hostile to after-the-fact (i.e, ex post facto) criminalization of acts that were legal when taken. (Art 1, §§9 and 10.) Britain’s habit of doing that was one of the main reasons behind the American Revolution.
Wood’s core argument against Trump is that a president’s plenary power does not extend to nuclear secrets. The reason, Wood says, is that the Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, produced a super-category of classification revolving are anything nuclear, one that overrides even the president. That’s untrue.
Presidents can voluntarily respect a national security law, but they do not have to abide by it. Again, plenary power means, as Wikipedia summarizes, “a power that has been granted to a body or person in absolute terms, with no review of or limitations upon the exercise of that power.”
Wood cites Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518 (1988) to argue that nuclear secrets override the president’s power. He contends that “The 1988 Supreme Court case Navy v. Egan confirmed that classification authority flows from the president except in specific instances separated from his powers by law.” Wrong again.
The Egan decision examines only whether a civil service board can review a “laborer’s” being denied national security clearance. In that context, the Supreme Court was clear about the president’s plenary power, unimpeded by congressional acts:
The President, after all, is the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” U.S.Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant. See Cafeteria Workers v. McElroy, 367 U. S. 886, 367 U. S. 890 (1961).
In sum, the only proof you need that Trump declassified the documents is the fact that, when he was still president, Trump treated them as declassified. Biden cannot criminalize Trump’s actions by later re-classifying the documents (and there’s no evidence that he did). And of course, if there were nuclear codes, they are changed regularly and would certainly be changed from one administration to the next, meaning that any information Trump has is as useful as the cartoon in an old Bazooka bubble gum wrapper.
@Honeybee Same period.
@Honeybee My maternal grandmother’s parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who owned and ran a dry goods store in Lowell, Masschusetts though they lived on a farm.
Sebastien One of my favorite movies. One of my favorite old photos is of German Jewish brother immigrants in Texas. They were owners of a dry goods store. They are pictured wearing Western clothing festooned with firearms. Nice Jewish boys gone completely native.
@Honey Bee
A Polish rabbi in the old American West. Gene Wilder. “The Frisco Kid (1979).
https://youtu.be/pEAXGY_HFU0
@Honey We were getting off the topic so I googled: Trump+Feta to make it topical. –
@Honey Israeli feta is the best, and after that, Bulgarian and Pennsylvania Amish, believe it or not.
@Honey Can’t imagine why you thought of Travolta. I was thinking of Verdi’s opera, “La Forza Del Feta,” as it happens.
Sebastien, I too like feta, especially if it is imported from Greece. And don’t be sending any video of John Travolta.
@Honey I like Feta.
Sebastien what can I say, your fate is in your own hands.
@Honey Wait, I left? And I missed it? Darn! Doesn’t aging suck?
Sebastien. Any more sarcasm and you are back in the “bad chair”.
@Honeybee Why some of my best friends… 😀
I think you would be surprised at the number of people I know who like Jews.
Sebastien, I love me, myself and I so much that I gave all three a hug.
A typical antisemitic reflex is, when The Jews disappoint someone by not reacting to something in the right way, they withdraw their support. A recent comment I read: I have donated to the Holocaust Museum, but after Israel failed to [whatever] I can no longer support them. It’s like a husband divorcing or hitting his wife because she didn’t cook breakfast the right way.
In pre-Holocaust Hungary, they used to say, “an anti-semite is someone who hates Jews more than necessary.”
@Honeybee
No, I don’t because it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Besides, most of those who are not antisemitic tend to eventually get “disappointed”, you know, like, “I am not an antisemite but when I saw [fill in the blanks], I realized [fill in the blanks again].”
There are some people (very very few) who sincerely think well of the Jews but if they show it and insist on it, they get severely punished by the society (politicians don’t count because everyone knows that they will say anything to get votes).
@Honeybee Then, I hope you will be very happy together with you, yourself, and you.
Sebastien, I think my statement was self-explanatory
.
@Reader
Pardon my French.
@Sebastien Zorn
I counted 9 on the 1st page alone – this search was done on the Amazon website.
You want me to do a “global” Google search on “Antisemitism in America” to show that there are more than 3 or 4 books on the subject?
I thought you knew that these days the searches no longer give you the exact search results but everything that looks similar to what you want so you have to read further than the 1st few lines.
President Trump Announces Court Filing Against DOJ and FBI for Fourth Amendment Violations
@Honeybee explain.
Sebastien & Reader. Do you ever look for those who a NOT anti-Semitic?
@Reader There were only 3 or 4 in the list you linked to, but Though I have read extensively onthis subject, and wonder whether you have since just gave me a google search of books on Amazon, most of which were on orher topics, you are teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, so to speak. It’s way more dangerous in Israel.
@Sebastien Zorn
There are many books on the subject, I don’t know why you had to zero in on that one – I am not trying to tell you what to read or what to do.
I like to read history books but I know a few people who tell me “The less I know, the better I sleep” – OK, ignorance is a nice remedy for insomnia, I guess.
@Reader 😀 “Antisemitism in the age of Trump” Oh, that should be a fun read. And, yes, antisemitism and especially Israelophobia are growing problems but antisemitic murders, though they happen, are infrequent compared to Israel. I live here. And I read the defence/security sections of INN, THEJEWISHPRESS.COM, and YESHIVA WORLD NEWS every day. Especially, INN. Murders and attempted murders of Jews by Muslim Arabs are almost a daily thing and they usually come in clusters. There are even more stories of the IDF preventing murders and they are doing a great job, except in Yesha.
Here is a cri de coeur from a guy who loves animals, people, the world, etc. and who wishes to save them all from guess who?
Read this excerpt and decide whether there is anything you can do to change the honest beliefs of, basically, most of the world’s population (I think it is safe to extrapolate from what he is reporting).
There s no point in arguing about antisemitism in America.
Here is a list of books from Amazon by the authors who actually studied it (obtained by doing a search for “Antisemitism in America”):
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=antisemitism+in+america&i=stripbooks&crid=GODCFOEV0DI&sprefix=Antise%2Cstripbooks%2C101&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_3_6
I am sure the libraries have them in case you want to read the books.