Kash Patel, a former Federal Prosecutor and Department of Defense official under former President Donald Trump, has revealed a key flaw in the Biden Department of Justice’s claims following the FBI raid on Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago.
Patel explained that reports of classified materials found at the Palm Beach property are misleading because the documents were already declassified.
“Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves,” Patel told Breitbart News.
“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified,” he continued. “I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.’”
“This story is just another disinformation campaign designed to break the public trust in a president that lived on transparency. It’s yet another way to attack Trump and say he took classified information when he did not,” Patel added.
The report cited by Breitbart that Patel may have referred to was published by NBC News in February. In that report, NBC stated that the National Archives and Records Administration confirmed that it had found materials marked as classified in the 15 boxes of documents that Trump turned over to them in cooperation with their request.
“NARA has identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes,” Archivist David S. Ferriero said in a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Patel panned the story as “disinformation” according to Breitbart, adding “The story says the National Archives found the documents had classification markings on them. That doesn’t mean that they were not declassified. All previously classified documents have classification markings on them, it shows they used to be classified.”
“It’s petty bureaucracy at its finest, government simpletons not following a president’s orders to have them marked ‘declassified.’ The president has unilateral authority to declassify documents — anything in government. He exercised it here in full,” he said.
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The former DOD official went on to state that he doesn’t believe that the National Archives spoke to the Trump administration to check if the documents were ever declassified and will now consequently refuse to release them to the American public as Trump had allegedly intended.
“They are not a classification authority. I don’t believe they have unilateral authority to reclassify something the president declassified. They are the holder of records,” he said.
Without specifying what the documents are in detail, Patel predicted that the Biden administration would claim Trump was attempting to disclose “classified” materials but he noted:
“It’s information that Trump felt spoke to matters regarding everything from Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco to major national security matters of great public importance — anything the president felt the American people had a right to know is in there and more.”
Patel had laid out this scenario with the National Archives during Benny Johnson’s “The Benny Show” on July 4.
Describing that he was selected to be Trump’s representative at the National Archives and that elements within the government attempted to stop a mass declassification order initiated by Trump.
“At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.” Trump wrote in the order.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.”
Reportedly Patel has asserted that this declassification was not carried out per Trump’s order.
