When it comes to attention span, America is like a three year old child. Public attention focused initially on the “BIG” story of Friday–i.e., the release of the affidavit filed with a Florida judge to justify the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago residence. But the document was unreadable because huge swaths of text were blacked out. Got to protect sources and methods, don’t you know. Public interest faded.
But don’t worry. A new squirrel emerged to attract public attention–Fed Chairman Powell announced an interest rate hike and Wall Street reacted by jumping off the roof–the stock market plunged over 1000 points. Talk about a downer, literally and figuratively.
There is a serious story here, however, that merits the attention of Americans and, frankly, the rest of the world. It is the corruption of the FBI. The FBI is behaving like the East German Stasi or the old Soviet Union’s KGB. They are now behaving as political police dedicated to protecting the Democrats and punishing anyone who dares support Donald Trump. The FBI’s attempt to smear and discredit Donald Trump stands in sharp contrast to its treatment of Hillary Clinton.
Here are the facts. Donald Trump was the ultimate authority to classify and declassify intelligence when he was President. He declassified the documents in his possession at Mar A Lago before leaving office. That means that even if a document stored at his Florida residence is stamped TOP SECRET or GAMMA or TALENT KEYHOLE, it is no longer classified. There is no grey area here. Trump had the ultimate authority to declassify anything while he was President, including information pertaining to nuclear weapons and intelligence buried in Special Access Programs aka SAPs.
My understanding is that he has CIA/FBI SAPs that detail the 2016 plot to portray him as a toady of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Too bad for the CIA and FBI. Trump had the full legal authority to declassify that intelligence product. The CIA and FBI are frantic to protect the identities of the British , Australian and Italian intelligence personnel who helped plant evidence to frame people working for Trump. That is one of the motives behind the decision to raid Trump’s Florida residence and try to keep that information from the public.
Hillary Clinton is an un-indicted criminal in my view. When she was Secretary of State under Obama, she removed classified material, stored it on a personal server and then subsequently obstructed justice by ordering the destruction of a subpoenaed hard drive that contained the evidence of her crimes. James Comey admitted that Hillary had TOP SECRET SAP material on an unclassified drive. But Comey lied when he insisted he could not prove that this was a deliberate act. NONSENSE!
TOP SECRET material available to the Secretary of State (Clinton’s role at the time) sits on a TOP SECRET server. That server has no connection to SECRET or UNCLASSIFIED computers. To put a TOP SECRET document on an unclassified computer you must either print the document from the TS server and then scan it into the unclass or you must copy it to a thumb drive and then physically transfer it to the unclass system. You cannot do this accidentally. It is a purposeful, deliberate act. PERIOD. No grey area.
I wrote about this a few years back. There were even whistleblowers who went to the FBI to report Hillary’s illegal activity.
One year before Jim Comey was immersed in his plot to overthrow Donald Trump, the duly elected President of the United States, a brave Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State came forward with firsthand information of Hillary Clinton’s rampant abuse of Classified material. The man, a senior State Department diplomat who had served as the acting Ambassador (Chargé d’Affaires) in the Asia Pacific region under President Clinton, also was a veteran of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.
The FBI’s conduct and actions towards Donald Trump versus how they treated Hillary Clinton show gross bias and lawlessness. There was a meeting at DOJ headquarters in June of 2016 that was attended by a small number of DOJ and FBI officials. The attendees included FBI Director Jim Comey, DOJ’s Rod Rosenstein and FBI Special Agent Tim Thibault. It was at that meeting that Comey shut down the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s server. He did not want to hurt her Presidential campaign. There is documented evidence of this meeting and the actions taken that currently are in the hands of a judge. In short, rather than follow the law and apply it regardless of the political or socio-economic status of the accused person–Clinton in this case–the FBI and DOJ put their thumb on the scale of justice and did Hillary a favor.
In contrast to the kid glove treatment of Clinton, the FBI and DOJ continue to try to manufacture a crime in order to keep Trump from running for President. It is that simple.
The Constitution of the United States and the rule of law in the United States are now on the chopping block. It is up to the Federal Courts and Federal prosecutors to set this right. I am not optimistic.
The very heavily redacted affidavit in support of the search warrant of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Affidavit In Support Of An Application Under Rule 41 For A Warrant To Search And Seize
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1_1.pdf
DOW down 1000 points is an big upper day if you own puts.
Russian crimes trials in Mariupol should/might even out the scales of justice.
“Rubio clearly knows about the biolabs because he spends all day every day trying to cover them up. If we apply the logic of “he who screams the loudest”, clearly Rubio has something to hide.
Ever since Russia made it known they would be holding International Military Tribunals in Mariupol, the Deep State machine flipped a switch and began their disinformation campaign to hijack the buzzwords and accusations. These are literal Nazi tactics of accusing the other side of that which you are guilty.”
https://bioclandestine.substack.com/
Rubio is a member of the SSCI. I wonder what he’s worried about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Rubio#Committee_assignments
“Davis nails everything in that first three minutes, including the background motives of the DOJ, FBI and even congressional oversight authorities like the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, to desperately fear the evidence held by President Trump in Mar-a-Lago. All of the events are a massive cover-up effort to retrieve evidence of their own wrongdoing.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/08/26/three-minutes-of-pure-sunlight-the-truth-and-the-constitution-are-president-trumps-weapons/
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I don’t know my history too well but i imagine every declining empire had their version of the cia\fbi that eventually out grew and out powered the actual rulers. The Roman praetorians or whatever equivalent comes to mind where they held more power than the figurehead sat at top in Rome.
“Did Donald Trump bait the FBI?”
I think serious investigators and those who are honest with themselves need to start tracing the FBI (commercial militia) back to the Senior Executive Service (SES). SES was created under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. It was proceeded in the UK under Margaret Thatcher to privatize the civil service.
SES controls the FBI at the executive level indicating the FBI is controlled out of the pirate City of London. The SES acts as a choke point on all information flowing through the government and likely CoG (Continuity of Government).
America Is Not a Republic by Gary North
“This is a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way!”
When I was a teenager, that was a popular saying in conservative circles. Conservative circles in 1958 were very few and very far between. The movement lacked slogans. Every fringe movement needs a few slogans. Slogans are like secret handshakes in a club. They identify one’s true colors to those in the know.
That slogan was misleading then, and it is misleading today.
America is an oligarchy of lawyers and the businessmen who hire them.
In no other nation do five lawyers determine what is lawful and what is not. This supreme authority of five people is both a symbol and the legal foundation of the political system that rules 310 million Americans. Yet we are so used to it that we give it no thought. We assume that this is normative: “the way things are ‘sposed to be.” Yet it is neither normative nor Constitutional. It is merely traditional.
The political system is rigged by lawyers. It always has been. Until the major law schools adopt the principles of limited civil government and the strict construction of the Constitution — itself a lawyers’ document that was illegally passed, according to the original Constitution (the Articles of Confederation) — the conservative movement will remain on the sidelines.
What is the meaning of “we the people”? I asked that question of Warren Burger. He had written that these are the document’s most important words. On September 26, 1988, he wrote his reply. It was a six-word reply: “They are the key words conceptually.” He underlined conceptually.
Legally, the words mean nothing. For propaganda purposes, they mean that the rubes will sit there and accept what five people tell them they may or may not legally do.
No. You ignore the reality of the power that still resides with the states. The Republic has been eroded. The United States is not a democracy. Democracy is majority rules. The power vested in the Senate balances out the democracy of the House.
Larry,
How does the power vested in the Senate balance out the democracy of the house? Since the passing of the 17th amendment in 1913, Senators are elected by popular vote. The state legislatures no longer appoint Senators to represent the states at the federal level. Thus, the states no longer have a representative in the Senate chosen by the state. Sure, the length of the terms are different, but so what?
The Republic is in hospice on its way to the morgue. The seeds for its destruction were sewn by the likes of Alexander Hamilton during the coup in the summer of 1787 that resulted in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. Significant milestones on its path to hospice during which these seeds of destruction bore their poisonous fruit would include the Civil War, after which State’s rights effectively no longer existed, the passing of the 16th amendment, the 17th amendment, and the Federal Reserve Act, and the passing of the Social Security, Medicare, and Patriot Acts, amongst others.
1913 was a terrible year for the Republic. The 17th amendment got rid of the appointment of Senators by the states. The 16th before it gave us the income tax. And the Federal Reserve Act passed a few days before Christmas created the 3rd Bank of the United States (aka the Federal Reserve), a private corporation that is as “federal” as Federal Express and has the authority to legally counterfeit money. The Federal Reserve is not a federal institution and there is no reserve. It is a corporation of private banks that control our money supply. Since it was created, the “dollar” has lost around 98% of its purchasing power. If you’ve never read The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, I highly recommend it.
All significant political power has been consolidated at the federal level. States that attempt to re-claim their rights consistent with the 10th amendment will be attacked in the same manner that we see Russia attacked now by the West. The same ruses concocted to arrest Julian Assange will be used to go after state politicians that attempt to challenge federal power.
I don’t see a realistic path for the Republic to be internally restored. We will need to wait for financial insolvency to run its course in order for the conditions needed to foster a new political paradigm to be present. Social Security is financially insolvent and officially goes bankrupt in about 7 years. Medicare is also financially insolvent. Many state and private pension funds are financially insolvent thanks to the Federal Reserve’s suppression of interest rates since the GFC. The weaponization of the dollar by the Federal Government has accelerated the de-dollarization trend around the world. As the rest of the world stops using dollars to conduct commerce (particularly with oil), those dollars we have been exporting for decades since Bretton Woods will come flooding back into the country, and the purchasing power of the dollar will gap down. (Side note, Saddam and Ghaddafi were both deposed not long after they began efforts to set up oil markets that didn’t trade in dollars). The federal debt will never be paid back. And the federal government cannot afford to even service the interest on the debt were interest rates to levels last seen in the 2000s. For example, 6% interest on $32T is $1.6T per year.
Interested to hear your thoughts. And by the way, this is one of the best blogs on the internet.
Informative comment.
America has an organized crime family divvying up the proceeds of crime masquerading as a government.
…Since the beginning. The was the idea. Surprised?
Economic and perhaps Social Collapse in the US is inevitable. De-dollarization is accelerating. The implications are cataclysmic.
I want to thank you for being precise and historically correct in what you say. I agree with what you said in total.
I do want to add that one of the most egregious acts is the mal-interpretation of the interstate part of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
In the Filburn case, Roosevelt’s SUCUS went much much further and ruled that the Commerce Clause gave the Federals the right to regulate activity even if it was only indirectly related to interstate commerce. By that logic, it’s clear that the Federal scoff-laws now think, “Republic and Constitution be damned, we can regulate damn near everything.” And they act accordingly.
There’s another telling measure of the degradation of the Republic. Despite the Korean “War,” the Vietnam “War,” the two Iraq “Wars,” the Afghanistan “War,” etc., the U.S. Government has not declared war according to The Constitution since the beginning of World War II.
In pursuing these unconstitutional wars, the U.S. Government has killed approximately 5 million men, women and children, and caused untold death, destruction, and misery, creating a reservoir of hate for America and Americans all around the world.
This is what you get when you have a document that can be misinterpreted.
Just a closing point since the abortion issue was ruled on. I personally believe that the constitution does not give the state’s power to determine abortion issues. The 9th amendment says: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. The question is, what did James Madison mean when he wrote “retained by the people” in the 9th Amendment — and “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” in the 10th Amendment?
The repeal of Roe vs. Wade should have meant that the decision to have an abortion was left up to each individual woman, not a coercive State government.
Now apply that principle, embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments, across the board.
Yes, the Senate was a stop against the democratic excesses of the House, but that changed significantly when it became constitutional to directly elect Senators. Sure, the Senate acts many times as it should, but I assert that has today more to do with it’s constitutional member body count than anything else.
Making DC a state, for example, would change that structure.
That is exactly why the Democrats left the Union and started the Confederacy. They realized their power was fading fast, especially with the election of Lincoln.
Today, Democrats do not need a physical civil war.
It appears that not everybody realises that Mr. North was referring to a majority on the Supreme Court being able to decide everything that matters.
Thanks for the interesting quoted article.
Not merely “five lawyers” , “five GOVERNMENT lawyers”
We got along perfectly fine without a Federal Secret Police for 100 years. It’s time to disband the FBI.
America the sad sack.
All empires in terminal decline commit self harm . It’s just they way it is.
They then become a pompous buffoon full of delusional grandeur.
Just look at Britain, it gave the middle finger to the EU not so long ago and is now running around telling the EU and NATO what to do : ie hurry up and freeze to death!
The silly British Pigmy, just announces she is ready to launch nuclear war and destroy the planet. It maybe just me but this is total insanity yet nobody seems to bat an eye lip.
Talk about fluttering eye lids, look at the comic and tragic self destruction of the United…..? States.
There are too many dots being connected. Global floods then droughts. No hurricanes in August (l am waiting for 3 massive, humungous hurricanes in September.) Meanwhile a Russian -40c winter in London and Paris, but a pleasant and early spring in Moscow, fine elsewhere.
great article, the only issue I have is that the authority of the seating president to “declassify” secret documents is not as simple as you put it. Yes, he does have that authority, that is clear cut, but from what I understand from sources not anti-Trump, there is more to it, it is indeed a bit more complicated.
You conclusions however remain as solid as it gets. This country is screwed beyond salvage.
As usual, absolutely nothing will happen, you don’t even have an effective opposition Political Party in the USA to keep the bastards honest nor is there an Institution that’s not compromised. Talk about accelerating the country into a Banana Republic.
Sundance has a quite lengthy attack on the FBI, similar in respects to yours, here:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/08/26/tucker-carlson-outlines-dramatic-timeline-of-political-corruption-within-the-federal-bureau-of-investigation/
This stood out to me:
Ditto with the neo Nazis, proud boys and numerous other alt-right and far right trash.
You show great ignorance when you compare the numerous destructive acts of antifa (firebombing, shining lasers into the eyes of law enforcement, to name a few)
to whatever the groups you name have done (mainly speech deemed unacceptable by some).
And labelling them trash?
Laughable.
Like your cowardly hiding behind a pseudonym.
Here is the noted lawyer Alan Dershowitz giving his opinion on the legal aspects of the affidavit: https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3617378-the-trump-affidavit-four-conclusions-on-guilt-and-evidence/
Here is Judge Andrew Napolitano opinion on the three statutes that serve as the basis for the affidavit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56XjJejeDY
And the mistake that Donald Trump made, in possessing these documents which gave the politically motivated DOJ and FBI the excuse they needed. https://youtube.com/shorts/9H05v4odWHw?feature=share.
There was a complete Napolitano video from which the above were extracted but seems to have been taken down.
They may be lawyers but they do not understand the power of the President to classify and declassify. In other words, they are wrong.
What is your take on the argument that yes, technically the POTUS has the power to classify or declassify any government document he wants, but he must tell the relevant federal agency what he is doing. To simply remove these documents and take them home with him without going through this process is not declassifying them?
What do you make of the fact that Trump’s lawyers waited two weeks (after the feds had examined the documents) to request a special master to oversee the execution of the court order, rather than requesting one while the search was underway?
Thanks for another great post Larry! I would add as evidence of the political agenda and motive for interference in the electoral process of the US that is dictating the FBI actions regarding Trump was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
Here they suppressed a factually accurate story with materiel impact to an upcoming general election clearly to favor the democratic candidate.
Here are just a few examples of what happen to people not named Hillary Clinton when they mishandle classified materials. As George Carlin would say, it’s a big club, and we’re not in it.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/11/politics/justice-department-classified-info-hotel-home-sentence/index.html
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-air-force-contractor-pleads-guilty-illegally-taking-2500-pages-classified-information
https://www.fedsmith.com/2019/11/19/improper-handling-classified-information-leads-removal/
https://worldwar24.com/nsa-employee-charged-with-mishandling-classified-material/
While I agree with the post in general, I have a quibble that I am genuinely interested in having clarified. What was the declassification process that was followed?
windwaves has a point I’ve been trying to make with friends for days. There is a process that needs to be followed to legally declassify documents. Upon preparing to leave the office, a POTUS can’t simply wave a magic wand, or sprinkle fairy dust, over boxes of documents and declare them “no longer classified”, or can he? AFAIK, the law requires the downstream agencies that are affected by the classification of the documents, are REQUIRED to be notified.
Bearing in mind, the NYT is part of “Pravda on the Potomac”, this seems to be without spin, just a look at what is actually involved in the process:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/us/politics/trump-classified-documents.html
Presidential Power to Declassify Information, Explained
While it is legally irrelevant, former President Donald J. Trump claims he had declassified the top secret files the F.B.I. seized at his Florida residence.
Who has the power to classify and declassify information?
In the normal course of business, certain officials who have been designated as “original classification authorities” in federal departments and agencies can do so. They are considered to be exercising the president’s power over such matters, which has been delegated to them.
Are there formal procedures for declassifying information?
Yes. The 2009 executive order directs the head of the department or agency that originally deemed information classified to oversee declassification reviews, and it sets some standards for them.
The executive branch has regulations laying out the process that should be followed, such as a requirement to make sure that other agencies and departments with an interest in the secret are consulted. There are also procedures for the removal of classification markings on documents.
Can presidents declassify matters directly?
Yes, because it is ultimately their constitutional authority.
Normally, presidents who want something declassified direct subordinates overseeing the department or agency with primary responsibility for the information to review the matter with an eye to making more of it public. But on rare occasions, presidents declassify something directly.
For example, in 2004, President George W. Bush himself declassified a portion of his presidential daily intelligence briefing from August 2001 — a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — in which he had been warned: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Do presidents have to obey the usual procedures?
There is no Supreme Court precedent definitively answering that question.
Even if it is true that Mr. Trump had pronounced the documents declassified while he was in office, he clearly did not follow the regular procedures.
In the unlikely event that the Justice Department were to charge him under the law that makes the unauthorized retention or removal of classified material a crime — despite not listing it as a focus of the investigation in the search warrant — a novel question would arise if Mr. Trump were then to repeat the claim as a defense.
Proponents of a strong view of presidential power have argued in other contexts that presidents are not personally bound by the rules and procedures that regulate the conduct of their subordinates in the executive branch — and that presidents can even disregard executive orders without first rescinding them. Others disagree with that vision of executive power.
The statement from Mr. Trump’s office that was read aloud by the right-wing writer, John Solomon, included what appeared to be a gesture at the claim: “The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated by the president, needs to approve the declassification is absurd.”
What about nuclear secrets?
They are distinct, although for purposes of criminal law there is little substantive difference.
Congress has passed a law, the Atomic Energy Act, that imposes its own legal restrictions on mishandling information about how to build a nuclear bomb or enrich nuclear material. Such information is called “restricted data.” Legally, it is not the same thing as being “classified” under the executive order, although in everyday parlance people often refer to it as classified.
The law established a process for making decisions about downgrading such protections. For those involving military weapons, Congress mandated that the decision be made jointly by senior officials at the Energy and Defense Departments; if the two departments disagree about whether or not to do so, the law says the president makes the final determination. So at a minimum, those officials must be involved in any decision to downgrade nuclear weapons information into so-called formerly restricted data.
The Atomic Energy Act made it a crime for officials to disclose restricted data without authorization. But whether or not dangerous nuclear weapons information remains deemed to be restricted data, the Espionage Act separately makes its unauthorized retention or disclosure a crime.
Can a president secretly declassify information without leaving a written record or telling anyone?
That question, according to specialists in the law of government secrecy, is borderline incoherent.
If there is no directive memorializing a decision to declassify information and conveying it to the rest of the government, the action would essentially have no consequence, as departments and agencies would continue to consider that information classified and so would continue to restrict access to documents containing it.
“Hypothetical questions like ‘What if a president thinks to himself that something is declassified? Does that change its status?’ are so speculative that their practical meaning is negligible,” said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy specialist with the Federation of American Scientists.
He added: “It’s a logical mess. The system is not meant to be deployed in such an arbitrary fashion.”
POTUS is the ultimate classifying/declassifying authority, affirmed by SCOTUS in Navy v. Eagan (1988). He does not need concurrence, much less the approval of his subordinates. It might be nice to let them in on the decision, but he is not bound by existing EOs on the subject.
Your take is simply wrong.
While I agree with the post in general, I have a quibble that I am genuinely interested in having clarified. What was the declassification process that was followed?
windwaves has a point I’ve been trying to make with friends for days. There is a process that needs to be followed to legally declassify documents. Upon preparing to leave the office, a POTUS can’t simply wave a magic wand, or sprinkle fairy dust, over boxes of documents and declare them “no longer classified”, or can he? AFAIK, the law requires the downstream agencies that are affected by the classification of the documents, are REQUIRED to be notified.
Bearing in mind, the NYT is part of “Pravda on the Potomac”, this seems to be without spin, just a look at what is actually involved in the process:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/us/politics/trump-classified-documents.html
Presidential Power to Declassify Information, Explained
While it is legally irrelevant, former President Donald J. Trump claims he had declassified the top secret files the F.B.I. seized at his Florida residence.
Who has the power to classify and declassify information?
In the normal course of business, certain officials who have been designated as “original classification authorities” in federal departments and agencies can do so. They are considered to be exercising the president’s power over such matters, which has been delegated to them.
Are there formal procedures for declassifying information?
Yes. The 2009 executive order directs the head of the department or agency that originally deemed information classified to oversee declassification reviews, and it sets some standards for them.
The executive branch has regulations laying out the process that should be followed, such as a requirement to make sure that other agencies and departments with an interest in the secret are consulted. There are also procedures for the removal of classification markings on documents.
Can presidents declassify matters directly?
Yes, because it is ultimately their constitutional authority.
Normally, presidents who want something declassified direct subordinates overseeing the department or agency with primary responsibility for the information to review the matter with an eye to making more of it public. But on rare occasions, presidents declassify something directly.
For example, in 2004, President George W. Bush himself declassified a portion of his presidential daily intelligence briefing from August 2001 — a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — in which he had been warned: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Do presidents have to obey the usual procedures?
There is no Supreme Court precedent definitively answering that question.
Even if it is true that Mr. Trump had pronounced the documents declassified while he was in office, he clearly did not follow the regular procedures.
In the unlikely event that the Justice Department were to charge him under the law that makes the unauthorized retention or removal of classified material a crime — despite not listing it as a focus of the investigation in the search warrant — a novel question would arise if Mr. Trump were then to repeat the claim as a defense.
Proponents of a strong view of presidential power have argued in other contexts that presidents are not personally bound by the rules and procedures that regulate the conduct of their subordinates in the executive branch — and that presidents can even disregard executive orders without first rescinding them. Others disagree with that vision of executive power.
The statement from Mr. Trump’s office that was read aloud by the right-wing writer, John Solomon, included what appeared to be a gesture at the claim: “The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated by the president, needs to approve the declassification is absurd.”
What about nuclear secrets?
They are distinct, although for purposes of criminal law there is little substantive difference.
Congress has passed a law, the Atomic Energy Act, that imposes its own legal restrictions on mishandling information about how to build a nuclear bomb or enrich nuclear material. Such information is called “restricted data.” Legally, it is not the same thing as being “classified” under the executive order, although in everyday parlance people often refer to it as classified.
The law established a process for making decisions about downgrading such protections. For those involving military weapons, Congress mandated that the decision be made jointly by senior officials at the Energy and Defense Departments; if the two departments disagree about whether or not to do so, the law says the president makes the final determination. So at a minimum, those officials must be involved in any decision to downgrade nuclear weapons information into so-called formerly restricted data.
The Atomic Energy Act made it a crime for officials to disclose restricted data without authorization. But whether or not dangerous nuclear weapons information remains deemed to be restricted data, the Espionage Act separately makes its unauthorized retention or disclosure a crime.
Can a president secretly declassify information without leaving a written record or telling anyone?
That question, according to specialists in the law of government secrecy, is borderline incoherent.
If there is no directive memorializing a decision to declassify information and conveying it to the rest of the government, the action would essentially have no consequence, as departments and agencies would continue to consider that information classified and so would continue to restrict access to documents containing it.
“Hypothetical questions like ‘What if a president thinks to himself that something is declassified? Does that change its status?’ are so speculative that their practical meaning is negligible,” said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy specialist with the Federation of American Scientists.
He added: “It’s a logical mess. The system is not meant to be deployed in such an arbitrary fashion.”
The case you refer to, seems to have zero to do with anything in the NYT piece, which isn’t necessarily my position. I am asking for clarification on what the process is, for declassification. Are you in the “sprinkle the fairy dust” or the “wave the magic wand” camp? Looking at the decision you proffered, I have no clue what you are talking about. Care to quote a specific section?
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/484/518/
Nice try. It is real simple. The President has the ultimate authority to classify and declassify. Period.
According to the EO that Obama signed, both the President and the VPresident can declassify whatever they want WITHOUT permission from anyone, whenever they want.
Obama made it very simple for both himself, and joe, to declassify documents.
So you’re just copping to this now? Hoover setup the FBI to serve the ruling plutocrat elite, and it has been doing that since the very beginning. Black, communist, socialist, pacifist, feminist, left academic, anti-war student…anybody who didn’t fully accept their catholic, white-guy, button down narrative has been investigated, smeared and even murdered (Fred Hampton ring a bell?) by this these ham-fisted, corrupt servants of the ruling class for generations. Well, welcome to the ever expanding club!
Larry, I don’t know enough about these things* so I ask and with respect:
What are the chances the Federal Braindeath Implanters of imperial continuation are going after Eel Dumpsteroso for no other reason than that he is the only candidate on the horizon who might conceivably, especially in a constraint-free 2nd term, severely reduce their funding or even deep six them forever as an institution?
* If you think they are bad, imagine for a minute an America without rule of law or freedom of the press, or ruled by an absolute hereditary monarchy. The United States with a 2nd term Trumpenstein monster as president promises, in the eyes of many people, and not just whiney “liberals” to become exactly that. No need to explain to me how it already is almost there already. I get that very well, and can fire up Twitter anytime for every other nitwit on the planet’s “profound insights” and pasted memes. I also agree with you, by the way, that Count Bidenula – Tomb Raider of Scranton with his trusty sidekick who appears to be possibly as shallow as a puddle of mouse whiz is not a threat to replace Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson with a huge marble statue memorial as a recurring venue in top 5 tourist attractions of Washington DC.
Did Josephinenstein Monsteroso give us his $10,000 and fifty cents reduction in Student loans due to the release of this 2 minute trailer on an upcoming film: My Son Hunter?
https://youtu.be/GCvb6TfBXFk
Or do you think it a grift which looks for payoff by the DNC or one of it’s oligarchy creatures a la the famous shakedowns of yore (don’t release the full feature) ?
Larry is aware of the political practices here in South America. He must remember that, here, it is not uncommon for state mechanisms to be used against political opponents. Lawfare, for example.
I am amazed to see that similar customs are also implanted in the US.
Beware, there are other even more pernicious practices that can happen.
We have experience of this.
I write from Brazil.
Something’s completely off about Biden’s administration and I believe we all know what it is. Our President is not in charge of the Executive, period.
Take this truly illegal from any angle you want to take raid as an example.
At first the White House stated they were only notified of the raid by the news and they hewed to that line for a while. Of course it was BS, but taking it true meant without a doubt that the President and his administration were seen by the interagency, US Army LT Col Vindman’s word, as worthless, with no power, and the DoJ and FBI went completely rogue.
Today, the White House is silent, running deep, while it has been made known that our President was directly involved with this.
We truly have no Executive leadership. It’s a sham, a fake, Biden can barely communicate and when he does coherently, he damns himself way more often than not.
Tucker did a piece called “The Decline of the FBI”. The FBI had not declined. The FBI is as it has always been, an unconstitutional agent of political thuggery.
The history of the FBI is in a word, pathetic and its legacy is incompetence and corruption.
From the time it was run by a cross-dressing Nazi to to the present, it is has been a national embarrassment.
Among many other examples, recall that this is the agency that spied Martin Luther King and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide, spied on John Lennon, framed Brandon Mayfield and Richard Jewell , invented pseudo-science techniques like “neutron activation analysis”, “blood splatter” and bite mark analysis. Its labs have been caught many times faking evidence which begs the question how many times were they not caught. They make a lot of noise over their “criminal profiling” which had never solved a single serial killer case, and totally failed to find a shred of actionable evidence in the Atlanta Child Killer case and their fumbling and bumbling around hampered the real investigation.
They sat on their thumbs while Antifa burned American cities and concentrated their ire on innocent people trying to defend themselves against those maniacs.
In short the FBI needs to go, it cannot be fixed because it is what it always had been useless, corrupt and a danger to civilized society.
I know I have heard everyone say “Oh, there are some good people in the Bureau” Well sorry if you are still in that corrupt mess you forfeit all rights to call yourself a good and honest American, it means you value your paycheck more than your integrity. The agency cannot be fixed because in reality it is not broken.
I was thinking if there in anything funny about the current state of the FBI is when the Nazi was in charge they went after anyone who said they were a communist, today they go after anyone who is says they are NOT a communist.
They purposely drove the beautiful actress Jean Seberg to her death by tormenting her over her supposed affair with a black man. Hoover, in addition to be a cross dressing homosexual Nazi (understand why LGBTQ is promoted in America yet, sports fans?) J Edgar was an ardent racist. But he was a very clever, powerful racist who made sure to record himself exchanging jocular banter with the actors of the Amos and Andy show. Why didn’t he go after the mob? The story is Meyer Lansky showed him pictures of the FBI chief in fragrance delicto with a young man. Ended the mob’s troubles for a long time. J Edgar, at the age of 27 or so was arrested in a New Orleans men’s room for proposition a NO vice squad detective, or so the story goes. A very close relative of mine was a US nuclear physicist in the late 40s and 50s while they were turning academia upside down looking for commies and leftists. His wife claimed that the FBI killed one her husband’s grad school professors on the operating table. His crime? Nothing except a rumor that the man attended a leftist rally in Germany in the 1930s. You could cut the atmosphere of fear in that household with a knife if that topic was discussed for thirty seconds. They opened every single piece of mail going into or out of San Francisco for an entire year (learned from mi5 and 6 but brought to industrial perfection by the Hoover organization). Their network of workplace informers is so dense that it was estimated one out of 6 Americans met and spoke with an fbi informer daily without knowing it. Hoover had, once a year to answer Congressional questioning on wiretapping and potential abuses. At 9 AM he called the Postal Office where a thousand or more fbi employees monitored calls illegally 24/7/365. At the hearings at 11AM he would reply to the obvious question: Sir, at this time I can truthfully say that the bureau has at most 15, 25 tops, agents monitoring calls of known or suspected communists and subversives.” And he was telling the truth. Back in his office he picked up the phone and gave the all clear.
Today? They can and do in real time watch everything you do online or record it and actively interfere in numerous ways if they so choose. So do the Intel organizations of several countries and various corporations and foundations do too.
Valid points all. It can never be “fixed” because it is not broken. What it is it has been from the beginning.
On a side note, the FBI responded to the Zuckerbergs admission on Joe Rogan.
Its possible Zuckerberg was lying, but the FBI can always be counted on to lie, what really happened, not sure but if we can imagine a scenario that covers both of them lying, that’s probably what actually happened.
Yes. Even more entertaining are the discussions of how spy and secret police agencies manage to get passwords to various very carefully secured websites. “Oh, you see they have warehouses full of supercomputers working 24/7 running de-encryption programs devised by the greatest most sophisticated minds on the planet. So, there is not many a password that they cannot decipher. And lawyers and loopholes in legislation that enable them to legally impel corporations to give them information vital to national security.” Yes. And Don Corleone did too, right? Think you’d keep a password from him, for say ten minutes?
I suppose if they have a massive parallel array working on a brute force algorithm perhaps one can be cracked in a reasonable time. But that is one, what about brute forcing 1000, 10,000 a million plus the bandwidth needed to try them. I don’t think so. They want us to think they have all this power and technical competence but looking at any government agency you are basically looking at the Post Office with badges and guns.
They are not ever going to be competent and try to make up for it with brutality.
It is why I never use Google anything, nor FB and the rest.
Never use Gmail. Never put any Google or Alexa device in your home.
Good news Larry
Trump knows that McConnel is his SSCI enemy and is working with the Demoncrats to undermine him.
“Trump-McConnell Spat Distracting From GOP’s Work To Defeat Democrats In Midterms, Strategists Say”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-mcconnell-spat-distracting-gops-work-defeat-democrats-midterms-strategists-say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)
Anybody who has been paying attention knows the FBI has been playing fast and loose for years.
The Media PA break in, in 1971 told us all about Cointelpro. Waco, Ruby Ridge, this bogus kidnap plot in Michigan. Then There’s Richard Jewell in Georgia. The Anthrax investigation seems a complete disaster.
January 6th was FBI. If you think 1-6 was an insurrection, you ain’t ever seen an insurrection.
The Hunter lap top thing has me boiling. I know John Paul Mac Isaac. I use to fly his flight simulator when he had it on the 2nd floor of the DCCA, now “The Contemporary.” 51 intel agents say the lap top is bogus and ruin John Paul’s life. 51 intel agents should have their pensions revoked.
I’m 70, so I could give a few personal tales from the anti-war/student protest days.
My vote for Trump did exactly what I wanted to happen. It threw a monkey wrench into the system. He actually got more done then I thought he would.
I spent 15 years in D.C. and it was eye opening. Deep State and Uniparty?? You Betcha.
Good summary, Larry!
I am very, very pessimistic that this rot, this corruption will ever be fixed. where are the leaders who will lead the fix? Nowhere because they do not exist in what passes for a “political system.
Who will do the fix: the corruptors?? Forget about it! The uniparty likes things just as they are.
The fix would require a complete dismantling of the fourth branch of govt, the intell branch=cia, fbi, enablers in congress, state, pentagon. Think about that and then realize it will never happen.
All of this talk about nuclear secrets, failure to follow the declass process is a complete distraction.
IMHO, what set the panic off with this gestapo/doj was the issue of what trump had pertaining to the massive effort to block him, take him down, etc administered by the fourth branch.
In my view, the us is dead, rotten from within, administered by criminals and liars.
What this means for the average citizen is unclear but the normal defensive reaction is to hunker down and try to stay out of the way of the gestapo. There ain’t anyone or anything “out there” to protect the average citizen. It may sound cowardly but think about the ramifications IF someone decided to “take to the streets?” The power structure, the thugs in the gestapo, the criminals in doj, would come down like a ton of bricks and that someone would be suicided (see Michael Hastings, RIP) or left to rot in a Guantanamo structure without bail or trial.
Finally, I would strongly second the recommendation from Keith Harbaugh above to review and keep reviewing the articles on Sundance. Disregard the strongly pro-trump commentary and see that he is doing a lot of work on this rot.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
There is a story at the Gateway Pundit about a Ukrainian woman, Inna Yashchyshyn, who supposedly is a deep state plant. This seems like one of a long list of such occurrences. How do they do it? Does this account for the “myth” that the US has elaborate plans and schemes that are always one or several steps ahead of everyone else? They seem to be able to manipulate world events.
One other point: The FBI may have conveniently overlooked this woman’s unusual background.
The armchair lawyers and Trumpsters know little to nothing about the relevant law. They emotionalize. Why not listen to a real lawyer who’s neutral?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1X31K-0bYA
Trump broke lots of laws…and stupidly. (As usual).
Enjoy. No crying.
We all break laws, most of us commit three federal felonies a day.
THAT is the real problem.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d5WOwC5Fs64
As far as Trump breaking sone laws. I am all for it.
Laws today are not designed to protect our rights. They are designed to keep us all in line and obedient.
Almost a century late it seems but great debate guys lots of info and knowledge!!
#WWG1WGA