Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely postponed Donald Trump’s classified documents trial in Florida, citing significant issues around classified evidence that would need to be worked out before the federal criminal case goes to a jury.
No, the President can't just declassify ANY document with the stroke of a pen. Extremely sensitive information, for example nuclear weapons technology, has to be subjected to bureaucratic review process to determine what can actually be declassified, or not.
But none of that is relevant to this situation, so it wouldn't solve it. Judge Cannon would simply generate additional reasons to delay the trial.
If someone was going to jail for having those documents, making them available to the public might not be the best demonstration of why they needed to be kept secret.
On the contrary, releasing the documents would demonstrate exactly why the documents were kept secret. However, doing so would not retroactively legalize mishandling the documents when they were classified.
Trump is only being charged with mishandling the documents. If he sold them, that is a much more serious crime and they would have charged him for that instead of just mishandling.
If the documents really were sold there wouldn't be a good reason to keep them classified. The worst has already happened. The only thing keeping the documents classified does in that case is hamper the prosecution from pursuing the case.
If the documents really were sold there wouldn't be a good reason to keep them classified. The worst has already happened. The only thing keeping the documents classified does in that case is hamper the prosecution from pursuing the case.
How would declassifying not help? How would declassifying not cause the case to be impacted negatively because the case is about classified documents?
Juries make decisions on the facts of the case when the crime occurs. Declassifying the documents now does not change the facts of the case as the documents were classified when the crime occurred.
Keeping the documents classified is an issue because they are evidence, and juries can't do their job if they are not allowed to see the evidence.
Declassifying documents is a process with a known timeframe. The jury issue isn't.
If the accusations were credible they would be in a court rather than on twitter. Countries are constantly trying to uncover the spies of other countries. If russia or any other country is capturing more spies that itself is not evidence of a breach, it could be caused by many other factors.
It is possible to evaluate the credibility of claims even when those claims are against someone we all hate.
Unfortunately that depends on the contents of the classified documents, it could be anything from what did the president have for lunch one day to all the details one could ever want on the nation's nuclear weapon capabilities. Even if the president technically can declassify such documents, it is not a good idea to actually do so.
If the case needs a jury to make decisions of fact, and the jury is not allowed to see the evidence, you have an unsolvable problem.
Declassification is a process that takes a known timeframe. It is something the executive branch can do, and because they know which documents they are releasing, they can prepare for the results.
Juries make their decisions on the facts of the case when the crime occurred. The documents were classified when trump had them. The future status of those documents does not change the facts of the case.
You are also making claims without evidence or anything to back them up.