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Know which ones they are. if they have had other reporting or had viewed them at another time as was reported i think in may, and they are no longer part of the records that were taken during this search. they could conclude that they were destroyed. they could conclude that they were moved to another location. we don't know. and i think that's important. what triggered the search warrant in the time leading up to from the meeting in may to now, what was the urgency associated with it. also, to the former president's point that he declassified many of this, many of your guests have said, the p...

And saying that he was able to declassify whatever he wants. joyce, put that -- make sense of that for us? explain that to us. >> well, i'd love to make sense of it, katy, but it doesn't make much in the way of sense. it is a shocker that the former president would try to distract from his own problems but invoking barack obama who by all accounts including this official one complied fully with the presidential records act. when it comes to these new suggestions that trump could have declassified these documents on his way out the door, this rings a little bit too good to be true. and certainl...

Authority to declassify these documents and that he did so. that would be an issue of first impression for any court to consider. there is no statute or regulation that actually prescribed how a president of the united states is supposed to declassifydeclassify material b customarily that's something always handled by a subordinate officer. presumably there ought to be at least some actual process rather than the mere ideation in the president's head, walking around as a declassification authority that he has declassified something. so the department will have to think through all these issues...

Restructuring the classification system. there are regulations and procedures in place. the president does have declassification authority, but he can't just sweep aside all the rules, so we would need to see if there was contemporary documentation, if the procedures were followed, if he was just making that up, and even if he got out from under the classification issues, under a variety of statutes, including 18 usc 2071 he's legally liable, potentially criminally liable for removing, mutilating or destroying any document, not just classified ones, so i don't think that ploy is likely to succ...

The -- you know, there is questions about who else might have handled them, whether he went through the proper procedures to declassify them, whether any procedures were followed at all. i think in terms of the presid president's criminal liability, and you know this well as a former prosecutor, because of his classification authority, the case for prosecuting him possibly as the january 6 committee looks at criminal referrals, doj and inspectors general are looking at this, the case on the classified documents has some complexities because of the declassification authority. it is also a crime...