Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said former President Donald Trump is more dangerous than previously thought if he truly believes a president can declassify documents with a mere thought.
The congressman, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a constant critic of the 45th president, reacted to comments Trump made during a recent interview amid the fallout from a raid of his Mar-a-Lago resort, in which FBI agents sought documents he retained there after leaving office. Prosecutors say roughly 100 of those records were marked as classified, including some labeled top secret, but Trump claims he has declassified all the documents in his possession.
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“There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it,” Trump said during a Fox News interview last week. “If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it,” the former president added.
Asked to respond, Schiff told CNN’s Jake Tapper that is not how the process works.
“Those comments don’t demonstrate much intelligence of any kind,” Schiff quipped on Sunday. “If you could simply declassify by thinking about it, then frankly — if that’s his view, he’s even more dangerous than we may have thought, because with that view, he could simply spout off on anything he read in the presidential daily brief or anything he was briefed on by the CIA director to a visiting Russian delegation or any delegation and simply say, ‘Well, I thought about it, and therefore, when the words came out of my mouth, they were declassified.'”
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Trump is under criminal investigation for potential violations of the Espionage Act, as well as obstruction of justice, according to the search warrant underlying the raid. Trump has denied wronging and is waging a legal battle to halt the use of the seized material. A federal appeals court sided with the Justice Department last week, allowing the agency to continue its criminal investigation using allegedly classified documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago while a special master conducts an independent review for records that could be deemed privileged.
Judge Raymond Dearie, who was picked to be the special master, told the former president’s legal team last week he must provide evidence of declassification, or else he will have to assume the records seized by the FBI are classified.
