Former Donald Trump White House adviser Alyssa Farah Griffin tore into her former boss on Thursday for his conduct in the Mar-a-Lago classified document theft investigation.
Trump has long claimed he has blanket declassification authority, but new reports show he was caught on audio discussing a highly classified document laying out an attack plan against Iran, and admitting he doesn't have full authority to declassify military secrets — something that should come as no surprise, Griffin argued, because she saw firsthand that Trump understood this.
"I mean, we talked about the former president wanting to keep documents, or wanting to keep some documents," said anchor Anderson Cooper. "Does it make sense to you what's — what we now learned yesterday?"
"This latest reporting is probably the most damning around the classified documents. I mean, obviously, the former president's argument hinged on this notion of A), he could declassify anything, and that anything he had in his possession has been declassified. But he obviously acknowledges that he knows he simply can't declassify things. There is a process. I've said before when I was serving in the West Wing, there were a number of times he wanted to declassify documents, and he ran through the hoops of trying to do that, talking to his national security adviser, his then-director of national intelligence."
In fact, Griffin continued, "I can think in a number of cases where we weren't able to declassify something because he knows of the hoops he would have to jump through. He knows how the process works."
"What you also can't forget in this — we're not talking about a keepsake like a love letter from Kim Jong-un, as absurd as that sounds," said Griffin. "We're talking about war plans with Iran. Something that is actionable U.S. intelligence that has broad impact that is sitting at a country club in New Jersey. This is the height of irresponsibility, recklessness. And if we have any laws governing how we handle classified documents, this is a rock-solid case."
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