Rep. Jim Jordan tried to turn an interview into a filibuster session in Trump’s defense, arguing the twice-indicted former president declassified everything before he left the White House—even as Trump admitted, according to the indictment, he did not.
Jordan tried to retort every question CNN anchor Dana Bash asked him with the same defense, arguing that because Trump declassified the documents he hoarded at Mar-a-Lago, special counsel Jack Smith was engaged in “the most political thing I’ve ever seen.” He pointed to the 1988 Supreme Court decision inwhich, as Jordan correctly noted, stipulated that the power to “classify and control access to information bearing on national security” stemmed from the U.S. Constitution.
“They’re indicting President Trump on Tuesday for having material that he declassified that was protected by the Secret Service,” Jordan said, later adding, “This is as political as it gets.” However, Jordan failed to accept that Trump knew, according to Smith’s 44-page indictment, that he was in possession of documents that were still classified. The indictment outlines an audio-recorded July 2021 meeting at Trump’s New Jersey golf club in which Trump showed a classified military “plan of attack” document to a writer, a publisher, and two staffers—none of whom had a security clearance.
Jordan also failed to acknowledge that, according to a former career White House official who was interviewed by federal prosecutors and who spoke to, Trump knew the protocol for declassifying documents—a protocol prosecutors alleged Trump did not follow for the batch of documents at the center of the indictment.
Jordan also seemed to forget that even Trump himself has offered different, and often contradictory, excuses for why he held onto the documents—documents the National Archives had been negotiating to retrieve for more than a year before an FBI raid last year. Those excuses ranged from
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