or the leader of the free world is engaging in a coup. and to say that i am immunized because i was working out at the white house, that makes the crime worse, not better. we re going to squeeze in a quick commercial break here. please stay with us because when we come back, i want to pick up this other news about mark meadows and what he has said about there being no declassification order that he was aware of by donald trump in the white house. we ll be right back with andrew weissmann and neal katyal. guys, c mon! mom, c mon! mia! [ engine revving ] my favorite color is. because, it s like a family thing! [ engine revving ]
a standing declassification order was just bonkers. john bolton, which worked trump then changed the story, saying that he could just mentally declassify things, like it s a jedi mind trick. the only person that has said he had a declassification order was a loyalist to donald trump. patel was brought before the grand jury, and recorded those reports. we don t know what he said after he was given immunity after the fifth amendment. we shall see, but as far as whether this declassification order exists, of course not. the fact that mark meadows told the feds it didn t is just one more piece of evidence. one more thing, if we needed more to find the truth about, this look to trump s words. he s an recording saying to everybody that i could have declassified when i was president, but i didn t.
nothing approaching that trump had that standing order that i could snap. nothing approached that. i can t imagine anyone that worked at the white house after me would have shrugged their shoulders and allowed that to go forward. kelly making the point that we understood the rules ask we were not casual about them. therefore, the process should have been followed. have you ever heard of the declassification order? they have never heard it. clearly, they have never seen it, it likely doesn t exist. it really undercuts so many of the public explanations and public defenses that the trump team has put forth. he s trying to draw this false equivalency between the trump documents and the one for president biden and the one that has been closed into pence. we know from our reporting, even though biden and trump are facing the special counsel investigation swoo the possible
this is a central issue in the case. we heard donald trump just last week tell kaitlan collins that he had declassified it. his story has varied as to how he declassified but i think that is absolutely something the defense team would have known about and i think mr. parlatore s comments confirm there was never a declassification order given in writing or verbally. and tim also said, i asked him about the certification. people had questions about, the legal team certified that there had been a search for documents. he said that the certification didn t necessarily mean that all documents had been turned over. just that the ones they found had been turned over. what is your assessment of that? we ve never seen the certification. yeah. he said that this was a very carefully lawyered statement. he basically said, all we certified was that we did our search and to the best of our knowledge, we had turned over everything we found. that might hold water if all they had missed was, let s
one of trump s agencies, one of his appointees said that people that work with cash were terrified of the prospect of him going to cia because they believe at the time that cash s goal was to go find classified information. he wanted to get read into the most sensitive programs in government especially on issues related to russia. solt that information could then potentially be doos declassified. this has some connective tissue to what we re seeing now with the mar-a-lago documents. i think, nicole, one two of things has to be true. either donald trump and cash pa tell are lying about the declassification of the documents in which case trump did retain classified materials. they re telling the truth and somehow the president wrote a declassification order. if that s the case, they implicated themselves in another