It’s been over a week now since the controversial raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Despite the “passage of time” (as Kamala Harris would say), we have more questions than answers.
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“All presidents take mementos and other records when they leave office. They don’t pack their own boxes,” explains Mike Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and the founder and president of the Article III Project. “The National Archives takes the position that almost everything is a ‘presidential record.’ And the federal government, in general, over-classifies almost everything.”
Even if Trump took classified records, that isn’t a crime. “The president has the inherent constitutional power to declassify any record he wants, in any manner he wants, regardless of any otherwise-pertinent statute or regulation that applies to everyone else,” Davis insists. “The president does not need to obtain Congress’ or a bureaucrat’s permission—or jump through their regulatory or statutory hoops—to declassify anything. How do we know this? The Supreme Court weighed in on this during the 1988 case Department of the Navy v. Egan, in which “The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’ U.S. Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security…flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
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Davis says that House Republicans, when they retake the majority, must impeach Attorney General Garland and FBI Director Wray for “their unprecedented and destructive politicization of the Justice Department.” He also called for a long-term plan to “dismantle and rebuild the FBI, so political raids like this never happen again.”
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