Re: Facebook Account

On 8/30/2024 7:51 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 8/30/2024 3:50 PM, cyclintom wrote:

 WHAT classified data was EVER declassified without an act of Congress?

 Well, according to your Orange Overlord, he declassified a bunch of Top Secret documents by just thinking about them!
 Don't tell me you're skeptical about that!
 

Congress has no direct part in decisions to classify or declassify.
Their part was to pass legislation for the executive branch decisions, protocols, apparatus, archives and so on.
The President has plenary power over classification/declassification in theory. In practice, it's all delegated and he never sees them except in extreme situations. There's a huge army of people involved in several levels of storage, retrieval, editing/redacting copies, access (who, where, when and what), record keeping on each of those actions and so on. It's very complex in the day to day workings, to which as anyone with any sort of clearance will attest. And carp about.
18 US Code 793 for the interested reader.
p.s. in the recent news, Mr Biden, as Senator, committed a crime by removing classified materials from a Senate SCIF. He committed another crime by storing them at home and in his offices in an unsecured manner. He committed another crime by moving them to his archive at U Penn (funded by the Chinese government and allowing no access to researchers, archivists, historians, reporters etc).
He may have an argument for materials stolen as Vice President, although the statutes do not explicitly say so. He could try an argument from Constitutional authority, that a VP candidate must satisfy all requirements of a President and stretch that to classified materials access so he's 'ready' should a bullet make it so. This argument is considered a long shot but I am not an expert.  Looking only at the Statutes, he's guilty of stealing classified materials and 'mishandling' which is the more serious charge.
In the prior President's case, the notorious FBI photographs were staged and show many boxes of materials in relative disarray with many 'Top Secret' covers prominently shown. The FBI brought those covers along for the staged photos. Actual classified materials were 18 items and summed to a couple hundred pages in total.  Under our Statutes the President may classify or declassify whatever he feels is necessary or best on any given day.
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Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971