Trump claims telepathic power to declassify ‘by thinking about it’

[Blkfyre]

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-claims-telepathic-power-declassify-thinking-rcna48908

Trump sat down with Fox News' Sean Hannity last night, who asked the former president about the process he allegedly took to declassify materials. He replied:

"There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it.... If you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, 'It's declassified.' Even by thinking about it, because you're sending it to Mar-a-Lago or to wherever you're sending it. And there doesn't have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn't have to be. You're the president, you make that decision. So when you send it, it's declassified. We — I declassified everything."

To be sure, it's easy to laugh at the idea that a president has a telepathic declassification ability. Indeed, people probably should laugh because this is deeply foolish, even by Trump standards.

But there's a serious dimension to this, too, since this is effectively the only argument the former president seems to believe in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation into his alleged misconduct.

Trump is no longer denying that he took classified materials to his glorified country club. On the contrary, he now seems to have largely confirmed that he "sent" sensitive documents to the Florida property, though he's never explained why or what he intended to do with these secrets.

Instead, the former president — not his attorneys, mind you, but Trump himself — is defending himself by repeatedly insisting that the classified documents were no longer classified documents.

[HighStepper]

'It's declassified.' Even by thinking about it,
Trump setting up a desperate defense. You see your honor, in my mind I thought they were actually declassified. So you see, there is no criminal intent to take classified documents. Because I truly believed they were unclassified documents.

[Danno]

Biden just reclassified them telepathically.