Trump’s Dubious ‘Standing Order’ to Declassify Documents

After the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home and retrieved boxes of documents — some of them labeled “top secret” — former President Donald Trump released a statement claiming that as president, he had a “standing order … that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

Numerous experts on national security and the law surrounding classified documents say that isn’t plausible. And in any case, whether some of the documents are classified — as many of them were marked — may be irrelevant to the criminal investigation, since none of the three criminal laws cited as the predicate for the search warrant require documents to be classified for a violation to occur.

Nonetheless, the fact that Trump may have been holding classified documents has raised the stakes of the investigation. And it has also raised questions about the scope of Trump’s declassification powers.

“I have been engaged in declassification issues since the 1970s, and I can attest that there is no precedent for such a standing order,” Richard Immerman, an assistant deputy director of national intelligence in the George W. Bush administration, told us via email. “Further, had he issued a standing order, it surely would have been ‘leaked’ by someone and then challenged.”