Because it’s worthwhile to find out whether Trump’s future defense team is going to try to run the declassification defense through Kash Patel. The classified or unclassified status of the documents is relevant (but not dispositive) of whether they are “closely held” as required for them to qualify as “national defense information.”
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“I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information,'” Patel said
That sounds like some of tfg’s mafiaso speak where he lets his desire be known and expects other people to carry it out without giving a direct order that can come back on him.
Who is “we?” Did Patel have a position in the line of authority for declassifying documents when tfg made that statement?
Does Patel realize tfg was using him as a buffer? Did Patel ever see the dog danged Godfather?
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I thought Grand Jury hearings were secret, so how do they know what the prosecutors confronted him with.
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Kash told his lawyers, his lawyers – possibly via someone else – spun it to the press.
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Classification status is irrelevant as far as prosecution under the Espionage Act is concerned. The Espionage Act is written in terms of national defense information, and the words “classified” or “classification” do not appear in it.
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They know what they’re doing, and they are very much not aboard the TFG train.
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How I hope the questioning went:
So what were the documents you “saw” declassified, again?
When did this happen?
Where did this happen?
Where are these “declassified” documents today?
Do you have any knowledge of the intended future uses of these documents?
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kashboy is a minnow
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Why are you linking to this wildly off-topic stuff when emptywheel has posted plenty explicitly on the TFG theft of documents, including one that speculates on why kashboy invoked the 5th amendment during the last testimonial go-round?
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The flacks can’t declassify shit. Only the president can do it by fiat.
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To answer seriously, it’s because a lot of readers here read @emptywheel and, as she’s changing platform from twitter to mastodon, it seemed to me that there would be people interested in getting her views at her new address.
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We already have a thread for discussing the post-acquisition twitter, and if you want to troll, the morning memo thread has many more readers.
Not quite.
Very quite. What txlawyer is referring to is that it is easier to convince a jury that a document is national defense information if it is classified. But it is non-dispositive, it just adds a day or two to the trial if the documents don’t carry the magic label. People have been successfully prosecuted before for “mishandling” (or worse) non-classified NDI.
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That’s rather a serious allegation, which I think has no justification in my history.
Perhaps from your perspective my post was misplaced; but, from my point of view, @emptywheel’s change of platform was news that would be of interest to enough of the readers of this thread to justify posting it, particularly as some of them are not on Twitter (like me.)
If your objection is that I didn’t put OT at the start of my post, that’s fair enough, but something that could be stated as such.
ETA: I had no interest in starting a discussion of Musk’s behavior on his platform, and included @emptywheel’s comments on it only as part of the quote in which she notified her readers that she was changing platform.
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We may be talking past each other.
… definitively makes a document’s classification status relevant.
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In a thread discussing Kash Patel’s surprise yesterday testimony??? This is the last i will respond to this, in the future I’ll just flag troll posts (and yes, to some here mentioning anything Elon Musk does is an invitation for an Emmanuel Goldstein 10 minute hate) and let the mods sort it out.
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Suit yer self,
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The difference is that I don’t consider a difference that adds a day or two to the duration of a trial to be relevant.
The prosecutors didn’t expect Patel to say anything incriminating about Trump, the Post reports… Patel was reportedly granted immunity for his testimony on Thursday, protecting him from facing criminal charges over whatever he told the grand jury – but only if he was truthful.
I don’t understand how both of these things can be true. If you ask him to describe Trump having declassified documents, which didn’t happen, he will either be incriminating or truthful.
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