Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) defended on Sunday ex-President Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort by claiming that Trump isn’t beholden to the same pesky rules as others.
There’s just one little problem with this “Luckily I declassified” argument, which I don’t think anyone has noticed. Why would Drumpf have a “standing order” to declassify documents the moment they were removed from the White House? He was President. He didn’t need to declassify documents to read them. What would have been the point?
“Fools rush in
Where wise men fear to go”
The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.
Has anyone asked these idiots going on about how Trump can declassify whatever he wants what the implications would be of having some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets out in the open now? That’s what declassifying means! They’re essentially speculating that Trump has more or less permanently blown up America’s entire intelligence capability. We all know he hated those pinheads at the CIA and elsewhere in the IC, but JFC, what a way to go down.
No one should ask a loyal and very ignorant ass-kissing trumpite from TX who’s up for reelection this year what he thinks. Beginning with he’s “The President.”
“He has a different set of rules that apply to him,” McCaul said. “The President can declassify a document on a moment’s notice, and we don’t have all the facts.”
Yeah? Well, Biden has a standing order and waved a magic wand that reclassified* them all “in a moment’s notice.” Duh!
Also, he’s not president anymore, moron. It’s been like 1-1/2 years, jenius! Try to keep up.
*PS: These laws he broke have exactly zero to do with classification anyway. We’ll prosecute for all those crimes later.
Again, for Pete’s sake, he wasn’t the President when he left the White House and took those documents. They did not belong to him - classified or not. And there’s a specific process laid out for declassifying documents, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve the words: hocus pocus, presto chango.
Which is precisely why the notion that the case requires a special master to decide executive privilege or whatever is so stupid. The current president gets to assert or waive EP and classify stuff, not the former loser idiot.
“I know they were taken out of the White House while he was president, and whether or not he declassified those documents remains to be seen.”
Which, of course, is a total non-sequitur.
He stole them. Classified or not (spoiler: they’re classified)…They. Are. Stolen. Property.
For a year and a half, he remained in illegal possession, ignoring demands to return them – including grand jury subpoenas (!), the refusal of which normally results in a visit from federal marshals with handcuffs.
He’s a common thief, and to quote his own words, I hope they’re not too gentle when they shield his head while stuffing him in the back of a cop car.
Shorter McCaul—Republicans are above the law.
Rep. Michael McCaul is effffing ignorant and an idiot. He’s been in Congress since 2005 and apparently has not learned anything about security process & procedures. We can only hope that Texas voters fire this SOB in November, but I have no confidence in that. Too many Texas voters are as stupid as Mr. McCaul is.
I hope this judge has a dog. She’s getting obliterated by judicial experts.
Different set of rules my ass. That we all abide by the same set of rules is what makes us different than Putin’s Russia or the French or English monarchies of the 17th century.
Last I looked he wasn’t the President. He is an ex President. Is the GOP creating an aristocracy that is better than the rest of us? That would appear to be the goal of the Federalist Society Judge in FT. St. Lucie. That is certainly the take of this Texas moke.
And McCaul is most definitely a fool. And a co-conspirator. And that makes him stupid, though not so stupid that he omits the weasel words that make a future non-denial denial possible.
There’s a shit-ton of us in Texas who are not.
“He has a different set of rules that apply to him,” McCaul said. “The President can declassify a document on a moment’s notice, and we don’t have all the facts.”
Luckily for the rest of us, the DOJ has far more “facts” than you do.
I think the gist of it is even dumber than that: he “declassified” them, but they’re still secrets, so he has to control access to them for the good of the country. He’s a one-man intelligence operation, keeping us all safe through his superior judgment and a padlock. Or, like, something.
Especially because, even if we assume that there is no malign intent (and for the record, I believe that there was plenty of it), the individual in question has demonstrated repeatedly that he is too dumb and too uninformed to even make a rational assessment of what the consequences would be if he declassified a particular piece of information.
An aggressively ignorant blabbermouth like him shouldn’t even be trusted with an Amazon wish list, never mind state secrets.
Even if Trump can take a briefing page and declare that he has now declassified it, he cannot declassify the material that the briefing page was covering. That is something the press and the toadies around Trump never talk about. The material in that briefing report is still classify and top secret! That is what the focus should be on.
