Top Republican Senator Says Trump CANNOT Release Documents By ‘Thinking About It’ While Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff says ex-president’s claim doesn’t ‘show much intelligence of any kind’
Wyoming Senator John Barrasso claimed FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was ‘political’ but admitted presidents can’t release documents with their minds
Trump claimed to Hannity last week that he could declassify documents simply by thinking about them while arguing in his own defense
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff said if Trump really believed that, he’d be ‘even more dangerous’ than the Dem thought
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The No. 3 Republican in the Senate said Sunday he doesn’t think a president can release documents simply by “thinking about it” — after the former president made the bold claim in an interview last week.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democratic critic of Trump who is investigating him on the Jan. 6 select committee, said it even more bluntly: “These comments don’t show much intelligence of any kind.”
Trump’s defense against allegations that he knowingly took classified documents from the White House when he left office last year raised eyebrows during an interview last week with Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity.
He told the conservative host that the documents that the FBI seized during an unannounced search of his mansion in Mar-a-Lago had been released because he thought them so in his mind.
John Barrasso, chairman of the Republican senatorial conference, was asked about the allegation during his own interview with ABC News’ This Week on Sunday.
“I haven’t heard that one before,” Barrasso told host George Stephanopoulos. “I’m telling you, when it comes to national security documents, we must always be extremely careful.
Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 in the Senate GOP, admitted that neither Donald Trump nor any president can declassify documents with their minds
‘I’m on the Foreign Relations Committee. We handle classified information all the time and are always very careful. I don’t know what—something about the rules for when a president releases documents and information.”
Barrasso tried to shift the spotlight to the Justice Department by demanding a secret briefing and denouncing the raid as “political.”
But Stephanopoulos insisted again: “You know a president can’t release documents by thinking about it. Why can’t you say that?’
“I don’t think a president can release documents by saying that, by thinking about it,” the Wyoming senator admitted.
Meanwhile, during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned that if Trump believes he can release documents with his mind, it would make him “even more dangerous” than he previously thought.
‘No, it doesn’t work like that. Those comments don’t show much intelligence,” Schiff said bluntly.
“If you could just declassify by thinking about it, then, frankly, if that’s his opinion, he’s even more dangerous than we might have thought.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, was even more blunt in his response: ‘No, it doesn’t work that way’
He explained, ‘with that view, he could just spit out anything he read in a presidential daily briefing or anything he’d been briefed about by the CIA director to a visiting Russian delegation or other delegation and just say, well, I was thinking about it, and therefore, when the words came out of my mouth, they were released.’
The ex-president told Hannity that he had released the documents recovered by FBI agents in January and June, and a third time via an unannounced raid on August 8.
Asked about the process behind it, Trump said, “There doesn’t have to be a trial, as I understand it.”
‘Different people see different things. If you are the President of the United States, you can release declassification by saying it is declassification. Even by thinking about it — because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it,” the former president claimed.
‘It doesn’t have to be a process, it can be a process, but it doesn’t have to be. You are the president, you make that decision. So when you send it, it’s released. I released everything.’
Trump used it as a defense in the ever-expanding DOJ investigation into his handling of classified documents