Originally Posted by James Brown
I agree. It will be very important for the political optics of the affair to learn what Trump had in his possession (if that is ever possible) Woe to the government if they just say it was "classified" and leave it to the voters to trust them. In that case, they just threw Trump a campaign lifeline. I'm repeating myself, but if what he had was classified, but objectively of no significant importance, then in my view Mar-a-Lago was a huge political miscue. J
Hi Jim,
That’s really not possible. Classification of information is done according to how much unauthorized disclosure would damage national security. In a nutshell:
Confidential: Information that would "damage" national security if publicly disclosed.
Secret: Unauthorized disclosure would cause "serious damage" to national security.
Top Secret: unauthorized disclosure which could cause 'exceptionally grave damage' to the National Security.
SpeciaLAccess: further restricted access to a small number of individuals and permit additional security measures. This category can be applied to any of the above classifications.
They found all of the above at Mar-a-Lago. By definition, if a document is labeled with any of those classifications, they cannot be “of no significant importance”. It’s hard to believe how stupid this was on Trump’s part – no excuse for it.