Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) tried to turn his State of the Union interview on Sunday into a filibuster session in Donald Trump’s defense, arguing the twice-indicted former president declassified everything before he left the White House—even as Trump admitted, according to a Thursday 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 in Department of the Navy v. Egan, which, 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.”
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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. He had used the document to refute a claim that Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had tried to prevent Trump from attacking Iran.
“See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump said, according to the indictment. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
Jordan also failed to acknowledge that, according to a former career White House official who was interviewed by federal prosecutors and who spoke to CNN, 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 declassification simply by thinking about it to the material being “privileged” to the material being empty folders with classified markings that were kept as cool “keepsakes.”
Bash noted some of these discrepancies to Jordan, explaining that Smith found the Secret Service was unaware Trump was allegedly hoarding boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. She also pressed Jordan on whether he had evidence that Trump declassified the documents on his way out, leading Jordan to offer what appears to be the crux of the GOP’s efforts to defend Trump.
“I go on the president’s word,” Jordan said. “He said he did and the Supreme Court said that’s what counts.”
In following “the president’s word,” Jordan seems to be following the lead of a man federal prosecutors indicted for, among 37 other counts, making false statements.
