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Pundits Scorn Trump's Telepathic Declassification Of Defense, Say He's 'Crazy'
- By The Financial District
- Sep 23, 2022
- 2 min read
Legal experts on Wednesday (Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022, in Manila) have ridiculed Donald Trump's Fox News argument that he had the ability to declassify documents with his mind, saying it is just like insisting the valuation of his assets depends on what he thinks it must be and not based on market prices, Bob Brigham reported for Raw Story.
Photo Insert: On Trump's claim of "mental declassification", the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote, "that's beyond wrong, it's insane."
"There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it. You know, there's different people, say different things," Trump told Sean Hannity.
"If you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, 'it's declassified' — even by thinking about it," Bob Brigham reported for Raw Story.
In response, lawyer and former FBI Agent Asha Rangappa joked: "He’s actually invoking the Secret Telepathic Unilateral Preemptive Irreversible Declassification (S.T.U.P.I.D.) defense."
The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote, "that's beyond wrong, it's insane."
On MSNBC, anchor Lawrence O'Donnell played a clip of the interview and asked national security lawyer Bradley Moss for analysis.
"Yeah, I saw that clip right before I came on and I tried not to burst out laughing," he replied. Moss noticed that judges ruled three times during the Trump administration that the declassification process must occur.
"If he is sitting there and thinking in his mind 'hey, I decided I'm going to declassify the secrets about Iran tonight,' the NSA needs to know if there was their signals intelligence or CIA needs to know," Moss explained.
"You can just willy-nilly do it and that's his big problem. That's why there is no declaration in the civil case proving he declassified anything," he said. "Because he's got nothing, zero, zippo, zilch, nada."
