top secret and sensitive compartmented information, and confidential documents. now, what does this mean? the top tier of that is some of the highest sensitive stuff that we have as far as keeping secret and there are laws about how that s handled. the president s lawyers are arguing that he declassified these documents before leaving the white house. now, that is a big power that the president has, a sweeping power to declassify, but there are also regulations that have to, a process has to take place. it s not like you wave a wand and say all these boxes are declassified. so there s a paper trail and specifics to that. so they will argue that it happened and we ll have to see where that argument goes. but the list of documents here is pretty interesting. overall 20 boxes. and what you see is that the judge, the magistrate sign it on
what your position was at the time and whether or not you were involved because we know there s a procedure that has to take place. the president can t just sort of wave over a bunch of boxes and say this is declassified. with you take us through the process where these documents were declassified by this president? yeah, the normal process there s multiple occasions i was serving as deputy director of national intelligence. if we needed to declassify through the normal chain of command for lower level employees, we would have to go through a rigorous process procedurally. the president of the united states hasn t always been the classification authority to classify and declassify. if he says something is declassified, that s it. it s declassified. he issued a strong statement to classify all russian gate and all hillary clinton documents. at the end of his administration, he thought so much more information needed to
found these documents that they were seeking that they thought might be at mar-a-lago, that might ve been part of the search warrant, according to the washington post. but, renato, if this is about u.s. nuclear security or another country s nuclear security, does that have any effect on the types of criminal charges someone could face? i think yes, first of all, and it also really limits donald trump s defenses. so, one of the defenses that there s already been a trial balloon out there, is that trump declassified documents before he left office. for nuclear documents, certain types of those, he cannot declassify those alone. he would need, for example, the department of energy to sign off regarding the declassification of certain nuclear documents. it also just, i think, makes it hard for a jury would have a difficult time believing that he declassified, in his mind. there is some belief that without telling anybody or
10:00 p.m. jonathan: you know, part of that timeline is intriguing to me is whether they knew there was t.s.s.c.i. material. having worked for security officers for decades, they take that really quite seriously. in order for me to get access to that information or case, they have to read me into every one of those programs. and once you are read in you can t bring anything out of a skiff. they are incredibly religious about these restrictions. it s hard to believe that those security officers believed there was t.s.s.c.i. at some resort in a storage room and there was a feeling of well, let s do it on monday, even though it s now friday. so, that s part of the thing we need to look at. did they know there was t.s.s.c.i. or did they just find it, is this part of the material that trump believed he had declassified? all of that is important to the specific crime, what we are
bret: yeah, and we have talked about this time frame. we know the grand jury subpoena, june 3rd, comes down for the documents. we know that they stopped communications of some kind. then you fast forward to the signed search warrant by magistrate bruce reinhardt on august 5th and then days later the actual move by fbi agents on the compound. what they find here, this list is significant. but that timeline is equally significant in justifying the action that was taken. mike: bret, please stand by. sandra. sandra: thank you very much. david spunt now. david. david: the former president on truth of social in his posts over the past i would say 12 to 15 hours, he wrote one, he said i continue to ask what happened to the 33 million pages of documents taken to chicago by president obama. the fake news media refuses to