Could he be starting dementia? Any other signs? |
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Donnie is claiming he declassified everything he took (which I don't believe, but anyway...).
Can he even do that for some of the stuff he is alleged to have? Could he just declassify the names of CIA informants or of people under FISA wire tap, take the materials with him when he left off, and then hand it over to, say, the Saudis or Russians? |
Uh, his handwriting and fingerprints are on the classified documents that have been in his possession since January, 2021 and somehow, people named in the HUMINT files are offed or compromised and you are seriously asking this question? |
Intent. His berating speech at the CIA HQ on his second day in office, and his constant maligning of the "deep state" (aka our law enforcement) are the tell. |
You are way behind on the news if you are asking these questions. the Times article is from October 2021. The names of the people compromised are known to our Intel community. It won't take long to match them up with the files from Mar-A-Lago. |
1) there are some things that were in his possession that he cannot declassify 2) he hadn't declassified anything 3) he never should have had possession of this stuff in the first place 4) they should have been in a SCIF, not in a basement accessible to all comers 5) now we understand that Mar-A-Lago was frought with spies for years. |
He didn't need a "list of CIA assets" -- their names are embedded in the documents he kept about specific operations. "Oh look, we got some intel on Putin -- I bet he'd like to know that. And the name of the guy inside his circle who provided it." |
You think 21 CIA officers (who are all American citizens) were killed by foreign governments and all you've heard about it is a story in the New York Times?
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Declassification is a red herring. It’s a ruse employed by people who have reason to believe that Trump betrayed his nation by providing too secret information to other countries. There is no logical justification for the unitary “magic wand” declassification. Had a program been declassified steps would have been taken by stakeholders to protect assets and sources/methods from disclosure. The president can’t simply declassify on an ongoing operation or program without regard to its repercussions. The only reason Trump claims to have used his unbridled declassification authority is so that he (or one of his operatives like Patel or Cohen Watnick) could share information without consultation with the IC. It’s a blatant attempt to circumvent the Espionage Act by people who didn’t fundamentally understand the law, or just didn’t care. |
+1 also for the crimes he’s accused of, it doesn’t matter if the documents are classified or not. |
It helps if you have the most basic understanding of the distinction between a case officer and a confidential human source (asset) when discussing CIA clandestine intelligence operations. |
He can’t and didn’t declassify them but even if he could and did they are still government documents and he is not the government. He can’t keep any of them. |
+1 Unbelievable the stupidity of the MAGAs. |