Former President Donald Trump was more of a threat than anyone may have realized because he was clueless enough to believe he could release sensitive top secret documents with his mind — and endanger the nation’s security, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Sunday.
CNN’s Jake Tapper played a clip about Trump’s “State of The Union” insisting to Sean Hannity earlier this week that he could declassify anything just by saying that — even just by “thinking about it.”
“Is that how it works?” Tapper asked Schiff.
“That is not how it works,” Schiff responded. “Those comments don’t show much intelligence of any kind. If you could just downgrade by thinking about it, he’s honestly even more dangerous than we might have thought,” he told Tapper.
Spreading or blurting out information about spies’ identities or the location and details of weapon systems could cost countless lives, experts warn. Still, former White House chief of staff John Kelly told The Washington Post that the former president had disdain for the secret shield and did not understand its importance.
“His feeling was that the people in the intel business are incompetent, and he knew better,” Kelly told the Post. “He didn’t believe in the classification system.”
People are “working hard” to get key information, said Schiff, who is on the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 uprising last year.
“People are risking their lives to get that information. That information protects American lives. And that he’s treating it so arrogantly shows both what a constant danger the man is, but also how little respect he has for anything but himself,” the legislator added.
According to Trump, he could “just spit out anything he read in a presidential daily briefing or anything he was briefed about by the CIA director to a visiting Russian delegation…and just say, ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it and that’s why, then the words came out of my mouth, they were released,” sneered Schiff.
A process is required to declassify documents. It cannot be done in secret, as different federal departments and officials must be informed to handle the material differently. For starters, the records would then be accessible to the Freedom of Information Act and other record requests from the press and public, John Bolton, the former national security adviser to the Trump administration, has noted.
So far, only QAnon disciple and former Trump Department of Defense aide Kash Patel has supported Trump’s claim that he had a “permanent injunction” to remove everything brought from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. , to release.
Court-appointed special master Raymond Dearie, who assesses documents seized by the FBI in Mar-a-Lago, has challenged Trump’s attorneys to prove that all documents marked “classified” are on somehow released by Trump.
Schiff also complained to Tapper on Sunday that the Justice Department was too slow to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
