Quote Originally Posted by time4fun View Post
It's actually an irrelevant question anyway. Even if we adopt the stance that Trump had the ability to psychically declassify material without going through the proper channels set up by the Executive Branch (and therefore *his* own rules for declassification), he's no longer an original classification authority. The Biden administration clearly considers anything marked as classified to be classified (and therefore it is), and DoJ has been telling Trump that this stuff is classified and have been negotiating with Trump for months. So he has been holding on to Top Secret documents that were being held outside of the special government facilities where they are legally required to reside.

Don't get distracted by arguments over whether or not they were declassified at the time they were taken. It's an important legal question, but regardless of the answer it doesn't make what he's been doing since he's left office legal.

This was yet another severe dereliction of the core part of his duty as a President. Just one more in a long line of shocking, intentional failures.
So, as President, he could store classified documents wherever the fuck he wanted. He could keep them in his bathroom if he wanted.

The ENTIRE crux of the matter is if the documents were classified or not.