Trump’s chief of staff told prosecutors he 'could not recall' a 'standing order' to declassify docs: report

20 August 2023

Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump's final White House Chief of Staff, told United States Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith that he "could not recall Trump ever ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House, nor was he aware of any 'standing order' from Trump authorizing the automatic declassification of materials taken out of the Oval Office," ABC News correspondents Katherine Faulders, Jonathan Karl, and Alexander Mallin exclusively report.

Smith indicted Trump on thirty-seven counts for unlawfully retaining classified documents at his Palm Beach, Florida Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office and four additional charges for obstructing the National Archives' efforts to reclaim them.

"Trump has insisted that he declassified all the materials before he left office," ABC recalls. "The former president now faces 40 separate criminal charges related to his possession of those documents, ranging from unlawful retention of national defense information to various obstruction-related offenses."

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ABC continues, "Following the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Trump's team issued a statement to one media outlet claiming that, while still in office, Trump had issued 'a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.' On social media, Trump himself insisted that the documents at Mar-a-Lago were 'all declassified.'"

Meadows, ABC learned from individuals familiar with the matter, "told investigators that he had heard the term 'standing order' used during his time in the White House, but not in relation to the declassification process."

ABC notes that "Meadows recalled to investigators only one instance in his time serving as Trump's chief of staff where he claimed to see Trump declassifying documents, involving a binder with materials from the FBI's 'Crossfire Hurricane' investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign's ties with Russia, multiple sources familiar with the matter said. That order, in the final days of Trump's time in the White House, has been a subject of dispute, however, as the Justice Department has resisted publicly releasing the purported documents at issue."

Although Meadows was not charged in Smith's complaint, he is one of nineteen co-defendants in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' forty-one-count indictment for the suspected failed coup to steal the 2020 election.

View Faulders', Karl's, and Mallin's scoop at this link.

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