https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-didnt-formally-declassify-mar-090728902.html
Trump didn't formally declassify Mar-a-Lago documents because he 'wanted these secrets to still have value,' legal analyst suggests
For weeks, former President Donald Trump has defended himself by saying that he had broadly declassified the documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago home.
That claim amounts to an "incredibly damning admission," wrote Asha Rangappa, a former FBI special agent who is now a legal analyst and editor at Just Security, in a tweet on Wednesday.
By not adhering to the official declassification process — and there is no evidence that Trump had done so — the former president showed that he wanted to keep the secrets in these documents valuable, suggested Rangappa, who is an assistant dean and a senior lecturer at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs.
"Why would you do that? Only if you wanted the secrets to have value to someone," she wrote.
Rangappa added that Trump would have needed to inform the respective government agencies if he had wanted to declassify any documents formally. This would have led to them taking steps to protect their "methods and sources." She added that the protection or removal of such information from the documents would, in turn, have devalued them.
"If you really think something should be public, then you want to take steps to protect the sources of the intel before your release it," Rangappa wrote. "But Trump claims he did it secretly. That means he intentionally wanted to leave these sources and methods exposed."
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