Trump had no 'standing order' to declassify documents, intelligence agencies finally confirm

Six days after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022 and removed boxes of classified documents he had refused to turn over, Trump issued a statement claiming all the documents he retained were declassified under a "standing order" he had issued when he was president. National security experts and former Trump administration officials were highly skeptical of the claim, and Bloomberg News reported Thursday that, in fact, no order was ever filed with the relevant federal agencies.

Some of those documents are at the center of the 37 felony counts the Justice Department has filed against Trump.

Bloomberg's Jason Leopold had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department's national security division soon after Trump issued his statement, seeking a copy of Trump's standing order. The government said it could neither confirm nor deny that such a document existed, citing the ongoing criminal case against Trump.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

On Thursday, after a court ruling in a similar case in Massachusetts threw out that rationale for withholding the information, government attorneys told Bloomberg that each agency "possesses no records responsive to your request" for Trump's alleged order.

The "standing order" claim is only one of many explanations Trump has given for his allegedly unlawful retention of highly classified documents. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Wednesday that based on his long acquaintance with Trump, he believes Trump just creates new lies about the documents each timed he's backed into a corner. The government's case against Trump doesn't require that the documents be classified in any case, only that they contain sensitive national security information.