Incorrect.
“It should be no surprise that the processes for both classifying and declassifying national defense information are elaborately regulated. A 1994 amendment to the National Security Act
directed that “the President shall, by Executive order or regulation, establish procedures to govern access to classified information which shall be binding upon all departments, agencies, and offices of the executive branch of Government.”
The
current Executive Order implementing this statutory command was issued by Barrack Obama in 2009.
Among other things, the order limits the authority to declassify certain information, placing under the Director of National Intelligence the authority, “after consultation with the head of the originating Intelligence Community element or department,” to “declassify, downgrade, or direct the declassification or downgrading of information or intelligence relating to intelligence sources, methods, or activities.” Those are the types of information classified as “top secret” and “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI) that the FBI retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
Various
regulations promulgated under the Executive Order require consultation with the agency that originally classified information before
anyone may try to declassify it, because those agencies have what is called, in the intelligence world, “
equity” in the information that must be protected.
There are numerous other statutory and regulatory restrictions that prohibited Trump from doing what he now claims to have done, including restricting the power to declassify any documents containing information relating to
nuclear weapons and
intelligence agents.
Significantly, some of the materials that the Justice Department just reported among those seized were identified as “human source” information, carefully regulated by statute.”
In the Nixon Tapes case, which I argued, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a president is bound by otherwise valid regulations … including declassification restrictions.
thehill.com