(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
This morning White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows filed a declaration federal court attesting that his boss, President Trump, is a lying liar who should never be trusted. Sure he’s like “the leader of the free world” or whatever, but the court should definitely ignore everything that comes out of that guy’s mouth. And when it comes to Twitter … PFFFFFT.
Oh, 2020.
Last year, CNN and BuzzFeed, along with reporter Jason Leopold, filed a FOIA suit seeking access to underlying documents and redacted information from the Mueller investigation. The Justice Department has steadfastly argued the necessity of withholding those documents and protecting the redactions under a variety of FOIA exemptions, including national security, individual privacy interests, and grand jury secrecy.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has mainly agreed with the government’s position. But the DOJ hit a snag last week when the president included these two tweets during a raging bender (perhaps fueled by the steroids pumped into him to treat the covid infection) after getting out of the hospital.
At first glance, these statements might appear to be contradictory — how can the president authorize his minions to do something that happened long ago? But four years into this nightmare, logical inconsistencies hardly bear pointing out.
At any rate, the plaintiffs immediately filed an emergency motion for COUGH IT UP, arguing that the president had just declassified the whole lot. To which the government responded that “[t]he President’s recent statements on Twitter referencing the ‘declassification’ of information were not an order to the Department of Justice,” and that nonsense words spewed by the president on Twitter “do not constitute a self-executing declassification order.”
In the DOJ’s telling, what the president meant to say was that he reaffirmed an earlier order giving Bill Barr the right to publicize any Mueller docs, a right the Attorney General has not exercised in this case.
This argument, that the president is just BS-ing and no one should take his Twitter feed seriously, has been largely effective before. But last Friday, Judge Walton seemed highly skeptical.
“How do I know that the statements made by the White House counsel are in fact the position of the president?” he demanded of DOJ lawyer Courtney Enlow, adding later, “When a president makes a direct statement saying he’s taking certain actions. I don’t think White House counsel can undercut that by taking a different position unless it’s the president himself who said, ‘I don’t mean what I said.’”
Which is how we wound up with Mark Meadows pinky swearing that he managed to tear Trump away from his milkshake and “conferred with the president concerning his intentions with respect to two statements he made on Twitter on October 6, 2020 relating to declassification.”
The President indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the classification or release of any particular documents, including the FD-302 reports of witness interviews prepared by the Federal Bureau of investigation in connection with the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller III. Instead the President’s statements related to the authorization he had provided to the Attorney General to declassify documents as part of his ongoing review of intelligence activities related to the 2016 Presidential election and certain related matters. The President’s statements do not require altering any reductions for any record at issue in this or any other cases including, but not limited to, any redactions taken pursuant any discretionary FOIA exemptions.
Oh, yes, that sounds just like President Trump. He would never weaponize the power of the federal government to interfere in an election.
Well, there was that time two weeks ago when he complained to Rush Limbaugh that it was “a disgrace” that Bill Barr hadn’t forced John Durham to come out with his report on the origins of the Russia investigation before the election. And that other time when he told his therapist Maria Bartiromo that “Bill Barr can go down as the greatest attorney general in the history of our country, or he can go down as an average guy. We’ll see what happens,” in regard to doing LOCK HER UPS to the entire Obama administration for tapping his wires to do RUSSIA HOAXES to him.
“I hope he’s doing a great job, and I hope they’re not going to be politically correct,” Trump whined. “Obama knew everything. Vice President Biden, as dumb as he may be, knew everything, and everybody else knew.”
But anyway, no declassification order, presumption of regularity, Trump definitely knows an FD-302 from a magical, invisible airplane. You bet!
Judge Orders That Trump Be Asked About Declassification Tweets in Mueller Info Fight [Law.com]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of 
