texassapper,
Trump violated many laws in the Florida document case.
"Trump's indictment has been unsealed. Read the 37 charges brought by federal prosecutors.
A federal grand jury brought criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.
The Justice Department brought the case over Trump taking government records to Mar-a-Lago.
Prosecutors allege Trump broke federal law when he took documents with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, rather than leaving them in the hands of the National Archives, which had discovered apparent missing records and sought their return. Some of the records included top-secret national security information.
Of the 37 charges against Trump, 31 are over alleged violations of the Espionage Act for "willful retention of national defense information." Trump also conspired to obstruct justice, lied to law enforcement, and violated three different statutes related to withholding and concealing government records, according to the indictment."
Trump took classified documents with him when he left the White House as EX-PRESIDENT. When asked to return the documents he returned some of them. He then ignored a subpeona requesting the return of the remaining documents. Only when it was clear that Trump would not return the documents was his home entered to retrieve the documents, at which time the documents were found in unsecured locations in Trump's home.
It is also alleged that Trump shared information in classified documents with others who were obviously not cleared to know their contents.
As for Trump being able to declassify documents:
"Most national security legal experts dismissed the former president’s suggestion that he could declassify documents simply by thinking about it. But as an ABA Legal Fact Check posted Oct. 17 explains, legal guidelines support his contention that presidents have broad authority to formally declassify most documents that are not statutorily protected, while they are in office.
The system of classifying national security documents is largely a bureaucratic process used by the federal government to control how executive branch officials handle information, whose release could cause the country harm. The government has, however, prosecuted cases for both mistaken and deliberate mishandling of information. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president as commander in chief is given broad powers to classify and declassify such information, often through use of executive orders.
In all cases, however,
a formal procedure is required so governmental agencies know with certainty what has been declassified and decisions memorialized. A federal appeals court in a 2020 Freedom of Information Act case, New York Times v. CIA, underscored that point: “
Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures,” the court said.
As the new ABA Legal Fact Check notes, the extent of a president’s legal authority to unilaterally declassify materials — without following formal procedures — has yet to be challenged in court."
https://www.americanbar.org/news/aba...ial-authority/
As it stands today, Trump was unable to declassify documents without going through well defined procedures. And the fact seems to be that he was an ex-president when he claims to have declassified the documents. Without a formal procedure for declassifying documents no one would truly know what documents were classified and which were not.
And even if the documents were declassified:
"After the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home and retrieved boxes of documents — some of them labeled “top secret” — former President Donald Trump released a statement claiming that as president, he had a “standing order … that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.
Numerous experts on national security and the law surrounding classified documents say
that isn’t plausible. And in any case,
whether some of the documents are classified — as many of them were marked — may be irrelevant to the criminal investigation, since none of the three criminal laws cited as the predicate for the search warrant require documents to be classified for a violation to occur."
Fortunately for Trump the judge handling the case, who was appointed by Trump, has made several controversial decisions in Trump's favor which will probably delay the case until after the election, at which time Trump, if he wins, will dismiss the case, a case in which in my opinion he is guilty as charged.
