Donald Trump gave Sean Hannity an exclusive interview on Wednesday — naturally it’s one of many ‘exclusive’ interviews he’s given to one of his best friends in media — and during their conversation Trump made a ludicrous, and extremely false assertion about how classified documents are handled.
You all reading this obviously know all about the raid on Mar-a-Lago that recovered numerous classified documents that Trump illegally removed from the White House and then repeatedly lied to the government about, right? Good. Moving on.
Now obviously Hannity is famously and very openly a Trump supporter. So much so that he was involved in a lot of secret conversations about Trump’s attempts to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election. (Hannity eventually advised against the actions that led to Jan. 6, after initially supporting them.)
Hannity noted that the President of the United States has the authority to declassify documents and said, “you have said on Truth Social that you did declassify” those documents.”
“I did declassify,” Trump interjected.
“OK, is there a process? What is the process,” Hannity asked.
“There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it. You know there are different people say different things,” Trump said. “But as I understand there doesn’t have to be. You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying ‘it’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it. Because you sending it, to Mar-a-Lago, or wherever you’re sending it, and there doesn’t have to be a process, there can be a process, but there doesn’t have to be.”
It goes on from there, including a ridiculous moment when Trump says “I declassified everything.” But we just wanted to emphasize the most obvious nonsense claim he made. You can watch the whole clip above. And also, yes, there actually does have to be a process. Read more about it here.
