DOJ Appeal To 11th Circuit on Mar-a-Lago Docs: Read It For Yourself

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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8 Responses

  1. We will now see how high up the rot goes.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Mike Schilling says:

      And we note that his lawyers won’t actually provide a non-existing list of supposedly declassified materials. I suspect they don’t actually want to be disbarred but are angling to get this appealed to SCOTUS.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

        He didn’t know what he had.Report

        • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird says:

          There have been stories told that the standard arrangement was, if Trump takes it up to the residential part of the WH, or orders it taken there, it was supposed to be automatically declassified. There’s still a chance that they’ll try to hang it on the staffers who didn’t follow through with the paperwork for that.Report

          • Philip H in reply to Michael Cain says:

            The classification discussion is one issue. Problem for trump is he s to lol had thousands of pages of government documents he wasn’t supposed to have, and at one point his lawyers lied in his behalf about giving it back. The alleged standing order doesn’t impact that one iota.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

            One of the things that I learned back in 2016 was the term “non-paper”.

            It’s apparently a term of art for taking a classified document and turning it into an unclassified document.

            Like, paper markings on a document are something like:

            (U) This is a paragraph about stuff that is unclassified.
            (S) This is a paragraph about the lizard people.
            (U) This is a paragraph about stuff that is unclassified.

            You can take that document, remove the part in the middle, and, tah-dah, you’ve got an unclassified document!

            That’s a sort of “automatic declassification” that makes sense to me.

            Was he just saying “anything that makes it to my part of the house, even if it’s about the lizard people, is now unclassified”?

            If it’s that, I would have appreciated more information about the lizard people coming out officially.

            Hey, could we make a FOIA request of the paperwork now that it’s unclassified?Report

            • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird says:

              Was he just saying “anything that makes it to my part of the house, even if it’s about the lizard people, is now unclassified”?

              Those are some of the stories. That if it was taken to the residence, the entire document contents were declassified. My meager understanding is that in such a case, word should have been sent to some responsible keeper who would take note of the fact that lizard people were no longer classified info and it would propagate from there. Or perhaps that the existence of the lizard people was no longer classified, but the size of their nuclear arsenal was still.Report

  2. CJColucci says:

    The Eleventh Circuit (two Trump appointees on the panel) granted DOJ’s request, not too subtly smacking down Trump’s lawyers’ and, by implication, the trial court judge.Report