Former President Donald Trump’s defenders in the matter of the Mar-a-Lago documents controversy are defending the indefensible.
Forget the legalities: For the sake of (spurious) argument, let’s stipulate that somehow Trump can concoct some looking-glass version of a legal argument that justifies his “authority” to do with the documents as he did. The point is that even if it was technically legal, it was wrong, wrong, wrong.
First, it is undeniable that even unclassified presidential records belong to the government, not to the ex-president — and even ones for which he may have temporary custody (for memoir-related purposes and the like) must be identified, cataloged, and explicitly granted through a formal process. As my colleague Tim Carney writes, “Because these documents were not his, Trump was supposed to return them, and the government had the authority to get them.”
Wrong as he was to have any unacknowledged records, he was even more wrong in refusing to turn them in despite many months of requests for them, further wrong in refusing even after a subpoena, and even more wrong in having his lawyer lie by submitting official paperwork saying they had all been turned over. There is no ethical or moral justification for the recalcitrance and the lies.
Trump’s actions were even worse, because we know (by his own admissions, both implicit and in some cases explicit) that some of the materials he held were classified — and at not just any level of classification, but apparently high or “top secret” levels. While there may indeed, as Carney writes, be a tendency of government to overclassify things, it is beyond imaginable that anything labeled as “Top Secret” can be anything other than of significant import.
As the Wall Street Journal explained, “Top secret is the highest level of general classification that can be appended to U.S. government documents. It is reserved for files whose release could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security” — and some of the Trump material, according to the FBI photograph, involved “special access programs” for “information considered extremely sensitive. That could include intelligence derived from confidential human sources and methods of intelligence collection, communications security, and nuclear weapons.”
Even if one buys into Trump’s absurd argument that he can make a blanket waiver of classification status without going through a clear process or filing paperwork to do so, there can be no doubt that information once designated as “top secret/special access programs” material is too sensitive to be kept in a less-than-secure location. Trump’s alleged magic-wand declassification might, in a legal bizarro world, make it legal for him to keep them in various places at Mar-a-Lago without special effort to keep them under lock and key, but it does not make it right.
Sensitive government documents, especially ones involving “sensitive compartmented information,” are no less sensitive — even if an ex-president removes the label from them. This is especially the case when the ex-president manifestly consulted no intelligence or defense experts in an organized or careful way in order to ensure that they merited declassification and would put no interests of American citizens or security at risk. This is especially true here when some documents did reportedly involve information on nuclear weapons. And when the documents are kept not just in an official storage room, but in various “desks inside Mr. Trump’s office,” the potential for leaks or theft (by others) is magnified.
If any other ex-president had been so cavalier with extremely sensitive natural security information, Trump’s followers and Trump himself would have loudly cried foul. What Trump did was entirely dishonorable. So are attempts to defend it and him.
