NEW: Trump claims he’s able to declassify whatever he wants. The feds are grilling former National Security Council personnel for answers, sources familiar tell Rolling Stone.
It’s unclear why a sitting president, who as commander-in-chief was privy to any classified information, would need to declassify work brought to the White House private residence. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, toldTrump and his allies have offered a confusing and at times contradictory set of explanations for why FBI agents found documents marked “top secret” in boxes at the former president’s South Florida residence.
In posts to his social media platform Truth Social, Trump has suggested both that the FBI was involved in “planting” evidence during the execution of the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, and that the documents found were “all declassified” in any case. More recently, Trump has reposted a public Jan. 19, 2021 executive order calling for the declassification of a specific binder of classified documents related to the FBI’s 2016 investigation of Trump and Russian intelligence.
The few Trump administration national security veterans willing to speak publicly or on background thus far have not corroborated Trump’s claims of a “standing order” for declassification. In a story posted Thursday, CNN asked
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