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Trump Now Says the TS Documents Were Just Homework [1]

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Date: 2022-08-13

Private citizen Trump appears to have dropped — for the moment — his absurd charge that the FBI planted documents. (The revelation that Trump’s own lawyer and some of his family watched the search live on CCTV may have had something to do with that.) Now he’s saying he was just taking his work home like everybody does.

Trump's latest defense for Mar-a-Lago documents is everyone 'brings home their work from time to time' and the files were automatically declassified

Former President Donald Trump said that everyone takes work home sometimes, as he sought to develop a new line to explain why top secret government documents were stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. "As we can all relate to, everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time. American presidents are no different," said the statement from Trump's office on Friday night read out on Fox News.

One. Trump has never been seen or known to work if he can possibly avoid it. Two. (Well, maybe One.) Trump was no longer president.

As if that wasn’t absurd enough, he followed up with:

"President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, from the Oval Office to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them," the statement said.

At the risk of repeating what everyone already knows, yes, a president can declassify documents — but there is a specific procedure for doing so. A cumbersome procedure. And there are secrets a president isn’t allowed to declassify on his own, like, say, nuclear secrets.

But that’s not the most appalling part. Trump is now arguing that, any time he felt like it, he could walk out of the Oval Office holding some of the most sensitive secrets, which if made public could do immense harm to the United States, and just by walking out with them he was making them public.

If Republicans are willing to swallow that, Trump might as well just shoot somebody on 5th Avenue. He’d be doing the poor fellow a favor.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/13/2116334/-Trump-Now-Says-the-TS-Documents-Were-Just-Homework

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