By Andrea Widburg
America First Legal (“AFL”) filed a FOIA request with the Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) for the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) to find out more information about the raid on Mar-a-Lago last year. Rather unexpectedly, the OIG responded honestly to the request, turning over records that revealed the White House helping to set up the FBI for the raid.
As a preliminary matter, Trump had an absolute right to possess any records he wanted, if he gained possession of them (as he did) while he was still president. It is black-letter law (that is, unquestioned, uncontested, absolute law) in America that the President of the United States is the last, best word when it comes to document classification:
In Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518 (1988), the court examined whether a civil service board can review a “laborer’s” being denied national security clearance. In that context, the Supreme Court was clear about the president’s plenary power, unimpeded by congressional acts:
The President, after all, is the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” U.S.Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant. See Cafeteria Workers v. McElroy, 367 U. S. 886, 367 U. S. 890 (1961).
Some Trump supporters think they’re helping Trump by pointing to the fact that he was working with NARA in accordance with the Presidential Records Act. They’re not, because that still buys into the concept that there is some sort of limitation on the president’s declassification power. In fact, the President Records Act is a procedural device that is utterly irrelevant when it comes to the president’s plenary power over document classification status. Neither Congress, nor NARA, nor any other bureaucrat who stamps the word “classified” on a document can undo Trump’s ultimate presidential power to declassify documents at will, without following procedures, filling out forms, or making announcements.
Of course, it’s quite different when it comes to all the classified documents that Joe Biden has squirreled away over the decades. Whether he was a senator or the vice president, he had no power whatsoever to declassify documents unilaterally. What he did was purely illegal, something compounded by his carelessness with the documents once he illegally possessed them, and he should be locked up for a long time.
With that in mind—that is, President Trump acted legally and constitutionally at all times—here’s what AFL discovered when it got the requested documents from NARA:
On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago on the ground that potentially classified records existed there. According to press reports, Biden Administration aides were “stunned” to hear of this development.
However, new NARA records obtained through America First Legal’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirmed that the FBI obtained access to these records through a “special access request” from the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
What this effectively means is that there are substantial discrepancies between what the Archives has told Congress and what appears in its internal communications. For example, Acting Archivist Debra Wall told Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) on August 16, 2022, that NARA “had not been involved in the DOJ investigation or any searches that it has conducted.”
This stunning revelation suggests that NARA was misleading Congress about the White House’s role in the shocking raid of President Trump’s home, and the fact that the Biden White House was acting “on behalf of” the DOJ raises significant legal concerns.
In other words, the White House lied to the public, and NARA lied to Congress. In reality, the White House, ignoring controlling U.S. law, worked with the DOJ and FBI to raid the residence of Donald Trump, a former president and Biden’s most serious opponent in the 2024 election, to smear Trump (and, they hoped, arrest him) as someone who had violated National Security laws.
Game theory says that, when your opponent changes the rules (i.e., cheats) to win, you don’t just keep playing politely and accepting your losses. Instead, you go after your opponent twice as hard using his own rules until he cries, “Uncle.”
In this case, given that Biden repeatedly violated national security laws, when Republicans regain control of the DOJ, it is imperative that they indict him and prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. And depending on the statute of limitations, it’s time to get Hillary, too, along with any other Democrats (and I bet there are a lot of them) who have ignored national security laws.
