Al-O-Meter
Well-Known Member
That's great Fish. You found an article who uses as their source a politician from the opposition party who has his degree in Latin Studies. You are not centrist like Avery. He has critical thinking skills and can weigh evidence from both sides while you've turned into the new The Thriller, vomiting up pages of the most biased content you can find.
Although I know it will be completely lost on you, others may find what actual legal scholars with fields of expertise in this exact issue and a published Supreme Court cases concerning a President's absolute power to determine what is or is not classified for the purposes of national defense have to say on the topic:
"if Congress were to enact a statute seeking to limit the president’s authority to classify or declassify national security information, or to prohibit him from sharing certain kinds of information … it would raise serious separation of powers constitutional issues."
--Robert F. Turner, Associate Director of the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law
"[The president is not] obliged to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed,and he can change those."
--Steven Aftergood, Director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy
Let’s dispense with one easy rabbit hole that a lot of people are likely to go down this evening: the President did not “leak” classified information in violation of law. He is allowed to do what he did. If anyone other than the President disclosed codeword intelligence to the Russians in such fashion, he’d likely be facing a long prison term. But Nixon’s infamous comment that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them. The nature of the system is that the President gets to disclose what he wants.
The reason is that the very purpose of the classification system is to protect information the President, usually through his subordinates, thinks sensitive. So the President determines the system of designating classified information through Executive Order, and he is entitled to depart from it at will. Currently, Executive Order 13526 governs national security information.
The Supreme Court has stated in Department of the Navy v. Egan that “[the President’s] authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.” Because of his broad constitutional authority in this realm, the president can, at any time, either declassify information or decide whom to share it with.
In short, Trump did not violate any criminal law concerning the disclosure of classified information here.
--Jack Goldsmith, Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, Matthew Kahn, Benjamin Wittes, Elishe Julian Wittes (All are lawyers in the field of National Security)
Bombshell: Initial Thoughts on the Washington Post’s Game-Changing Story
The Washington Post this afternoon published a stunning story reporting that President Trump disclosed highly-classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during their visit to the Oval Office last week. According to the Post,www.lawfareblog.com
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