Former President Donald Trump has insisted for months that he had a “standing order” that would declassify documents as soon as they were removed from the White House. The order, he claimed, would exonerate him in the ongoing criminal case regarding his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Now, both the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence say they have no proof that the order ever existed.
Bloomberg News received notice that the standing order, which would declassify top-secret government information once it left the Oval Office, couldn’t be found after the news organization filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit with the ODNI and the DOJ for a copy of it.
In a court filing in May, government attorneys told Bloomberg that they could neither confirm nor deny whether the agencies had the document due to the ongoing criminal investigation. But on June 29, the news organization received a letter from those attorneys stating that they have no records of the declassification standing order.
There’s been speculation over the standing order since August, when Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was raided and he posted on his social media platform that the FBI had taken “declassified” documents. Even though presidents can declassify documents, former intelligence officials have said that a standing order would have to be in writing and shared with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as well as the agency that classified the document.
According to the Straight Arrow News Media Miss tool, Bloomberg’s report has been largely ignored by right-leaning news outlets. A look at the media landscape of this story shows that it is mainly being shared by left-leaning and centered platforms.
The indictment against Trump outlines 37 counts, including willful retention of national defense information and corruptly concealing documents.
