Declassification System News Today

with republicans like hannity finally realizing that the partys toxic, regressive, authoritarian policies have sparked a voter backlash. also tonight, new reporting that donald trump almost certainly knew that a president cannot declassify documents just by stuffing them in a box and hauling them to the old golf resort, as repeatedly has claimed. plus, elon musks off the rails interview. the man who runs one of the biggest social media sites raises alarms with toxic comments about ...

caution its. ron klain having work to the judiciary committee with joe biden when he was chairman and the business of confirming those judges. ron klein told me about is last week of working for the white house that hes their underway fulfilling every vacancy in the federal courts. they might get to a point this year where theyre sitting there with no vacancies. >> wow! >> thats just an astonishing accomplishment. >> at a time when it is abundantly clear how very important the judiciar...

among other things, mike pences novel -- to put it kindly -- novel notion about why he should not have to testify before a grand jury. >> novel is one way of putting it, lawrence. i cant wait to see. it >> thanks, alex. >> thank you. >> well the breaking news of the night is that special prosecutor jeff jack smith has invoked the crime fraud exception in a motion to force one of donald trumps lawyers to testify before a grand jury without being able to refuse to answer questions bec...

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Claim that he had a standing order to declassify documents. 18 former top trump administration officials have told cnn that they never heard any such order issued during the time working for trump and that they believe the claim to be pat tented false. several officials laughed at this idea. if there was a magical declassification system that doesnt exist, donald trump never said to anyone at the time contemporaneously that he was declassifying things. that seems to me to also be a problem. >> i...

-- i dont even want to use the word system now. there is not a declassification system now. so how do things get classified when they do? >> it is a rude goldberg machine. if you looked at a diagram it would have dozens of boxes, and many more arrows. the fact is, just reviewing records to see which ones might be nuclear secrets as an incredibly involved complex process. and it just does not work. >> professor matthew connelly, the new don quixote of government classification joins us tonight. t...

Documents 50 years old. that is not what they are there to do. it ought to be given to a center, preferably in the national archives, whose job it is to say, we will do it for. you >> senator moynahan expanded on those ideas in his 18th book titled simply secrecy, published in 1988. by yale university press -- it was not exactly a bestseller and nothing came of the idea of establishing a real declassification system. now a full generation later, the problem is unchanged except for being much, mu...