After the FBI raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, the former President claimed that he had a “standing order” to declassify documents he took from the White House.
Now 18 former top Trump administration officials have said they never heard any such order issued during their time working for Trump, and that they believe the claim to be, in the words of one senior official ‘”bullsh*t.”
Two of Trump’s former chiefs of staff went on the record to knock down the claim.
“Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given,” said John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 17 months from 2017 to 2019. “And I can’t imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it.”
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton went further, calling the notion of a standing declassification order “a complete fiction.”
“Total nonsense,” one senior White House official said. “If that’s true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and DoD, which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill.”
But the investigation goes beyond whether the material was classified; when nuclear secrets were discovered among the boxes taken to Florida by Trump it becomes a possible violation of the ‘Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.’
A former senior intelligence official said intelligence community leaders, such as then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, would have been informed of any declassification orders.
“And they would not have allowed it,” the official said. “They would have resigned.”