WASHINGTON — A senior Democratic lawmaker said he hasn’t seen any evidence that materials the FBI seized from Donald Trump’s home were properly declassified, casting doubt on the former president’s explanations.
“And the idea that 18 months after the fact Donald Trump could simply announce, ‘Well, I’m retroactively declassifying, or whatever I took home had the effect of declassifying them,’ is absurd,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday.
Trump said Friday that everything taken by federal agents at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Aug. 8 was “all declassified” and “they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything.” Some of the former president’s supporters have claimed he has the power to declassify documents on his own.
