Leave it to the incomparable Jim Geraghty to find an informative legal precedent potentially applicable to former President Trump’s claim that he declassified the allegedly classified information retrieved by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago estate. Jim contends that the law says “there has to be a legal record of the declassification — a verbal ‘standing order’ doesn’t cut it.” If Congress steps into the breach to regulate procedures for declassifying intelligence (or at least tries to — more on that momentarily), one would hope that lawmakers would prescribe formal, written memorialization requirements such as the ones Jim has suggested already exist.
Alas, lawmakers have not yet done that.
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