With Trump’s signing S. 139 into law, that became: “ … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.” And with that, it became a felony.
You can see how Trump absconding with classified material to Mar-a-Lago would facially violate the law as articulated. So Trump’s allies have already been offering a rationalization: He had declassified everything he took to Mar-a-Lago…
We’re trudging toward a very gray area here, clearly, but it is conceivable that Trump’s defense against his potential possession of classified material at Mar-a-Lago may be that he declassified it while still president, even if no formal record of the declassification was made. This introduces a slew of other questions, since that material would now presumably be publicly available in some form.
“The president has unilateral authority to declassify documents — anything in government,” Patel told Breitbart. “He exercised it here in full.”
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