DOJ says presidents should be able to sell secrets on eBay
freedom.press200 points by _____k 2 days ago
200 points by _____k 2 days ago
It you don’t think national secrets should be sold on ebay to personally enrich whoever happens to hold office, good news: we are in the middle of election season and now is a great time to do something about it.
Let this serve as a reminder to vote! Removing this dementia addled criminal and his supporters from power is the patriotic thing to do if you care about this country and its future.
Just because POTUS writes down classified information in his personal notes/papers does not mean the information is no longer classified. Yes, POTUS has the power to de-classify, but there's a way of doing that so everyone is aware that certain information is now public. Doing it on a whim as a CYA because someone wants to make their illegal decision legal only after it becoming publicly known it occurred is not the way of properly de-classifying something.
The article talks about classification but this isn't really about classification or national security. It's about who has the fundamental rights over the documents after all that is sorted out. It's about can congress or the public force documents that embarrass or incriminates the president (after sufficient time and declassification has happened)
Classified information is covered by Executive Order 13526, issued by President Obama in 2009. Section 1.7 explicitly states:
(a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.
Being an EO, any following POTUS can rescind an EO of a previous POTUS. If you want a law to remain in effect across administrations, you have to get Congress to pass a law. Trump spent a lot of time in his administrations writing EOs that reverse Obama and Biden's EOs. If Trump ever came close to being in violation of this order, he would quickly rescind it. I put no weight in this being used against Trump
> If Trump ever came close to being in violation of this order, he would quickly rescind it.
Sure but the actual penalties for violating the EO are based on laws not the EO.
Like the actual penalties for sharing classified information are based on the information not the classification - https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
You say this as if Trump cares about a law passed by the congress. If congress had passed this law, Trump would still face no consequences. Courts will take many years to process it and then the Supreme court will dismiss it anyway as some sort of official action etc. Note that the Supreme Court will rule in a way that it can be reversed in case a similar case arises for a Dem admin.
This is a very astute comment! "Sell on eBay <TM>" is likely just a stupid narrative to stimulate the reactions of both camps. The real issue is whether all of the written records of this openly criminal conspiracy can be unilaterally taken/destroyed under the guise of "private property" when it's inevitably time for the regime to flee.
It was a hypothetical posed to the DoJ from a judge. The lawyer answered in the affirmative that they believe selling the documents with confidential information could be sold on eBay.
"with Judge Patricia Millett asking: “Can the president then offer on eBay to sell them, all of our national security secrets, to the highest bidder?”
The government’s response was, in short, “yes.”"
This was true up until the Supreme Court decided that executive power is not at all bounded by legislative power. Since all classification procedures and authority are directly derived from the president's executive power, the president does in fact have all of what you say he doesn't. Including the ability to classify/unclassify documents as legal cover.
One could argue the Espionage Act created this power but this court will definitely decide as you say. Even when Thomas and Alito are replaced by Justices Cannon and Lindell.
The best chance of having a Justice Canon would have been prior to now. If the control of the Senate flips, I hope that any position on SCOTUS that might open up would be denied based on POTUS being a lame duck following the precedent set by Mitch.
I don't think anyone still believes that that McConnell was acting in good faith there. If we don't get a December appointment then we're in for a long standoff.
Considering Trump's appointees haven't been as loyal as Thomas and Alito, I can only see him nominating absolute simps. He's going to need the pre-emptive self-pardon to hold up after all.
This sounds like POTUS is the new Roman Emperor of our times and he / she can sell the republic or interests of its subjects to anyone as he wishes, keeping all the benefits generated for his personal fortune and distributing all the mis-fortune / longer term effects to the wider population base... Guess what there is a name for this game, "Privatize the profits and socialize the losses".
Let's be honest here, this calvinball only applies to one political party. The other can't wear a tan suit or forgive a small fraction of student loans.
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Very strong attempt to both-sides a visibly one sided issue.
Esp. the "spending is out of control with both parties" fiscal take is quite wrong.
The one question both-siders never ask: which party has more momentum or internal turmoil to cut off the spineless corrupted opportunists. Pretty easy answer to that one...
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I'm a libertarian. The main issues our country is currently facing are not both-sided issues. Personally, I stopped steelmanning around 2020. We can get back to generally criticizing Democrats (ie the real conservatives) when that criticism does more than merely empower overly simplistic populist reactionaries to lean into accelerating our problems.
The shorter name is corruption. It's not any more complicated than that.
We need to remember that there is a mechanism to address this kind of corruption, which is impeachment and removal, and by failing to even consider it Congress has endorsed the behavior as well.
If there is ever any reconciliation they also need to be held accountable.
It looks like this stems from the Mar-a-lago raid in 2022. Did we ever find out what the president was actually squirreling away there that he wants to sell on eBay? I remember the leak at the time was that it was nuclear secrets, but I haven't really seen an update on it.
The results of that investigation were squashed by Judge Eileen Canon in Florida claiming the special prosecutor was not legal. Jack Smith has bent over backwards to not release information based on the court's decision to bar its release.
However, Trump's case against the BBC has become an interesting one. The judge overseeing this case recently stated that the BBC can call Jack as a witness potentially allowing an end run around Judge Canon's release of Jack's report.
Minor nit: in a legal context, the word is "quashed" - e.g., quashing a subpoena.
to be honest, I wasn't even thinking in those terms. I didn't s/squash/quash/ in my head and use the wrong term. I literally was thinking the judge stomped all over the case. Is quash really the correct term here as you're implying?
> quash
It's a formal term: to officially void, cancel, set aside, or forcefully suppress something.
In all of the articles around Judge Canon's actions regarding this case, I do not recall quash being mentioned. That's why I was asking if that's really what was done. I was not asking about the definition of the word.
Yes. I also closely followed this case, and the word "quash" was frequently used to describe her actions. I'd go so far as to say you probably subconsciously picked up on the verbage. The mind is a funny thing.
Yes, in the part of the definition to completely suppress or extinguish something.
Source article: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/16/presidential-record...
Recall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States for a moment:
"Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts".
Now, if there was any kind of consistency, there would be a ruling that the president's "personal" White House papers aren't above the law, but I expect another piece of legal Calvinball to happen again.
I mean, read the decision. Any evidence that proves whether a contested event or action was "official" or not is inadmissible in court. The Courts cannot investigate the President's motives when deciding whether an action was official or unofficial, and prosecutors cannot use evidence of immune official presidential acts to establish criminal liability, even when prosecuting separate, unofficial conduct.
We simply HAVE to take the Executive's word for whether an action was official or not.
Only when one party does it. See how quickly this will be ruled/interpreted the other way if a Dem admin does it next time.
we are living in age of monsters.
> “The battle stems from a Justice Department memo declaring that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and that White House files are now the president’s personal property — not the public’s.”
I just have to say this makes me so angry.
The Presidency is not a “private” endeavor. Drump comes from the private sector and thinks to run the Office of the President as his private business. Unforgivable.
We all know who Trump is. This behavior, from Trump, should shock no one by now. I'm equally upset with all those who enable him. Midterms are here, time to do the one thing we are still allowed to. Be certain, Trump will cry foul on the elections unless they go his way.
It's less about who is doing it rather than that a US president is doing it at all. Obviously, once you find the right person, things can change quickly. Finding the right person when the other two branches of government are controlled by the same party, you can speed run the end of democracy. This is the part that's really shameful to me more so than just a single megalomaniac POTUS. The fact Congress has just capitulated its duties while overtly corrupt members of SCOTUS flaunt jurisprudence is something I thought we'd never have to see.
Congress didn't capitulate, it facilitated by obstructing any resistance. And we all saw this coming with SCOTUS as far back as the Obama administration. It's certainly horrifying to see it play out, but we've seen the warning signs since the W Bush admin.
I think it's a combo of both really. McConnel denying Obama's rightful SCOTUS nomination was not capitulating, but Johnson's rolling over for this administration is. Clearly, the situation we find ourselves is not the result of a single action. I think the speed run really started back with Speaker Gingrich.
The trend of ignoring convention and pushing the boundaries of what is legal certainly seems to stem from Gingrich but from an outsider view it seems to have its origins with the Nixon administration
With congress I feel like they have been capitulating their duties for atleast a few decades now. They don't care at all about their job, they only care about the personal power and wealth and benefits that getting elected provides. In which case it was only a matter of time before someone like Trump comes along. With the only saving grace being that he is an utter moron.
At a certain point we just have to consider them all participants in a single oligarchic conspiracy to overturn democracy. If we cannot get justice through the system then it will have to be done by the masses themselves.
Careful, one or two more paragraphs down that slope and you might be accused of describing a Deep State and/or an insurrection
Yes, the reactionary movement has been very successful at abusing real criticisms and frustrations to motivate their supporters, while doing nothing to actually address those problems (and often even shamelessly leaning into exploiting them for personal gain). It's a one-two punch of directly making the problems worse, while arbitraging away the political capital that had built up around trying to reform them.
Congress is capitulating it's duties at least partially because anyone who tries to block Trump as a republican gets voted out. Oh sure, they stirred this shit up for 50 years and just reaping what they sew, but the train is free-running now and they can't really stop it.
The Voters want a Trump King. A government cannot ignore it's own people forever.
If the voters reward corrupt and horrific behavior, and punish law and order behavior, what the hell can you do about that?
It makes me happy every day that his clock is running out. Clocks. All the clocks running out.
But we need to do some serious rethink and work on curbing the power of the POTUS.
Nothing short of sending a few hundred cronies to prison, and the ones responsible for murder to the firing squad will curb that power.
He is visibly deteriorating. I'll be surprised if he stays until the end of his term.
It's only a matter of time before there is a deal between Trump and Vance for a pardon in return for retirement.
I think that's a bad deal for Vance. He wants to run in 2028 for a four year term. Becoming POTUS and inheriting all the baggage for 2 years would harm his chances.
He actually distances himself from a lot of stuff very carefully. Like we all know he was against the Iran war. He said he wasn't going to watch the execution broadcast. Etc.
I’m betting he will step down the day after the midpoint in his term. Giving Vance the opportunity to rule for 10 years.
And he can do a lot of damage until he is gone. He is too old to face any of the consequences he caused
>All the clocks running out.
Hate to burst your bubble, but behind Trump there are quite a few people that are ready to take his place, with no real chance of voting ever being able to stop them. Don't get your hopes up that voting blue matters. Everyone had the chance in 2024, half the eligible population did not vote. Now we get to live with those consequences.
US is done for.
The fun thing about society and nations is that rolling over and giving up is literally the only actual failure state.
Nobody is giving up. We are just going to start on the path of being what Russia is now, while China takes over as the world superpower.
In this day and age, 100% of all presidential acts need to be documented publicly. It's no longer enough to wave a piece of paper around and say "see, it has his signature." Random cabinet secretaries and white house staffers running papers through the autopen should be a capital crime and the only sentence should be hanging.
Is this really something that has been happening, or just some nonsense that has been thrown out to see what sticks? Yes, using the autopen should be limited to the mass signing of trivial correspondence like annual christmas cards or form letter responses to anything received from the citizens that used a stamp. Has there been any one seriously concerned about legislation or executive order type of documents being signed this way?
It's hard to know. People have opinions that it might be happening, which is why I call for presidential action to be public, and not in the form of final signed papers. I want to be able to see the president making the decisions and taking the actions that affect everyone in the country.
He supposedly signed individual pardons for 1,600 people in one day.
That would give me quite a cramp and I'm not 80.
I wasn't aware of this supposedly. I had assumed that the EO signed covered it in a single signature. Not sure which is worse here, my assumption or your supposedly.
Looking more into this, it looks like you're correct. It was a single action which resulted in that ~1,600 pardons, not 1,600 individual documents. My bad.
Grump will cry foul on anything, because that's what he does. Normally for someone at his point in life, this would be confined to yelling at nursing home staff for the food being too cold and having the wrong color skin (because their family certainly wouldn't be visiting). But unfortunately, there are way too many gullible fools in this country who felt validated by his crying.
While Im not going to dissuade people from voting, everyone should be prepared for the following reality: true and fair elections in US very like to be a thing of the past.
There are 3 big factors in play
* 2020 attempted coup gave the Republicans valuable information on what to do this time around. Basically, the game is to put US into legal limbo and remain in power. They know nobody on the democrat side is going to think about using armed forces, and they are not going to use armed forces to keep their public image and keep economy from panicking, so they are going to just declare some emergency and keep power under the pretense of fixing that emergency. Reminder that Supreme Court is on his side.
* Trump has shown that he has no issue with having a private army operating with extrajudicial authority in public. Now imagine with what he is ok doing with a non-public army. You should fully expect people going against him to get "arrested" under some made up charges.
* Even with Trump gone, there are smarter, younger, non senile conservatives ready to take his place and grab power and do the same things, with way less mistakes. Vance is right up there with him.
As such, even if everyone gets out and votes blue, in the end its all pointless. Trump can get impeached, convicted, and either Supreme Court says nah, or he just won't leave. In 2028, he (or Vance) will declare election fraud again and do it successfully this time to remain in power.
And even if somehow Dems win the house and presidency, and manage to pack supreme court to take control of all the branches, the thing is the will be left with a insanely shitty situation to clean up that will result in economic downturn, and the idiots in US will vote republican again in 2032.
Just give me a sec to crawl into a hole will ya?!
But yeah, re-election without re-evaluation of the systems that failed to protect the public from abuse will just result in a replay anyway.
cough citizens united cough
I think Citizens United isn't even the problem any more. We now have near-trillionaires who don't require a corporation to buy elections. They can do it personally.
The election systems are the weakest they will ever be. If we can make it through this last one, reform will happen.
I like the way it's worded, as it leaves open if you are buying information on a specific person or thing or haveing information on a specific person or thing, become secret. But the real money and show auctions will be for end of term pardons for things that cant be kept secret, and then there will be all sorts of deals and perks, get a free secret with a full family pardon and complimenterty stay in the white house epstien suite.
Ridiculous as it may be, I'm not sure the argument is incorrect under the law. The president is the ultimate classification authority. The only reason he was prosecuted for mishandling classified documents previously is because that was after he left office.
The American system of executive power needs a major rethink. For decades, Congress has given up more and more power to the executive under the assumption that the president will be a careful steward of those powers. This was a dumb decision at the time and it's made quite obvious now that an absolute cretin holds the office.
Unfortunately, I don't imagine we'll get that rethink. Instead, we'll just try to fix it by giving somebody else too much power and hoping they use it better.
The question is not around classification but of ownership and especially of the ownership of the documents after the president leaves office. The argument is that the documents generated during the presidency are the personal property of the president.
I wonder what is causing the centralisation around the executive branch in Western democracies? While the US is the more extreme example of the phenomenon, in the UK power has been consolidating in Number 10 for decades and the PM role has become more presidential than tradition dictates; compare say Tony Blair who was a very personal leader with Clement Attlee whose leadership style was more collaborative. The two systems are very different constitutionally, so it feels like there's broader factors causing this.
Wealth is the problem. Wealth buys media, PR, and propaganda. Wealth buys positions of viable candidacy. No body even thinks it is remotely possible for some rando off the street to get elected to a federal office, not because they lack intelligence or policy or anything, entirely because they need massive amounts of wealth to even be seen over the cacophony of others backed by a million+ dollars worth of megaphones. But of course after these powerful and/or wealthy assholes gain position they need to hold it, and since they lack a backbone or coherent policy they just keep passing the buck to everyone else which eventually ends up in the executive's lap.
The UK is very good at getting rid of individual PMs. Larry the Downing Street cat has seen seven of them since 2011.
The PM has a lot of power, but is very dependent on MP support.
I'd argue it's actually the Tories who are good at getting rid of individual PMs, the 1922 Committee gives their backbenchers a built-in regicide mechanism and the wider party has a culture of using it; even surviving the vote can hole a PM below the waterline. Labour leaders are harder to remove, Jeremy Corbyn for example survived his attempted deposition in 2016 and Reform's leadership entrenches the party leader further still. Having said that recent events support you more than me maybe, since Labour successfully deposed a sitting PM much in the same way the Tories repeatedly did.
Of course any PM still depends on Parliamentary support, by definition the Prime Minister is the one who can convince the monarch they can form a government which has the confidence of the House of Commons. My complaints of presidentialisation are more in the centralisation of power around Number 10, Blair was particularly known for it but it's been basically all of them in recent history.
In the US, I think a big factor was world events getting so much faster while Congress did not. For an extreme example, the President has the authority to unilaterally launch a massive nuclear strike, because there wouldn’t be time to get Congress together in a crisis.
It also seems to be a way for Congress to dodge responsibility. If you pass legislation to fix something by giving the president powers, you can claim credit. If it goes wrong, you can blame the president.
Congress created the laws which allow classification & declassification. The president is the authority over what gets classified, but should still be required to follow the procedures for doing so.
Declassifying documents is completely within Trump's purview, but surely selling classified documents runs afoul of the emoluments clause in Article II, Section 1.
It should, I agree, but in practice the enforcement mechanism no longer functions.
How are they selling classified anything if he's already declassified them? According to Trump, he can declassify anything be declaring he declassified them.
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For selling his own personal documents? That's crazy talk.
Edit: This is obviously a politically charged topic, so I should be more clear. If we accept the (absurd) premise that a president can sell national secrets on eBay because they're his own personal property, I'd be mildly surprised if a court found that he had to give the proceeds to the state.
Take crayon. Write down secrets on piece of paper. Sell on ebay!
Only in America.
I don't think being able to sell secrets on eBay is a bad thing. The point of secret classification isn't to restrict trusted people - but to restrict *unathorized* access. And highest person in chain of command naturally has full authority to do as he sees the situation fit
What I don't understand how it's allowed is that money earned from such ebay sell would go to private pocket instead of the government
I feel like that latter point isn't accentuated enough
So national interest doesn't exist? It's all at the whim of a demented money grabber, just because a small majority of the voters (if there really was a majority) got riled up?
The king decides what national interest is, and in this case it is in the national interest for him to auction the government off into his own bank account.
I know this isn’t an argument but when I read this my first thought was: How can a real person hold this opinion?
Childlike wishful thinking. There is a disturbingly large number of people who think like this. And there are, as you might imagine, strong incentives for certain individuals and organizations to promote this kind of thinking. Look up Curtis Yarvin if you want to see some deeply disturbed promotion of these extremely dark, and fundamentally anti-American, ideas.
> The point of secret classification isn't to restrict trusted people - but to restrict unathorized access. And highest person in chain of command naturally has full authority to do as he sees the situation fit
First of all -- what? The exact legal authority between the President and Congress here is murky, yes (see https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS21900). But it's completely ridiculous to claim that the only criterion for authorization is that someone thinks a person ought to be authorized.
This is unitary executive thinking, grounded in the principle that, because the president is the sole and chief authority and executor of the law, the president may do just about anything in that capacity. It's utter unconstitutional nonsense, no matter what our (openly compromised by lobbyists) Supreme Court justices say.
The latter point is "not accentuated enough" because it's secondary to the primary point, which supersedes it. No the president's whim is not the same as executing the federal laws created by Congress within the framework of the constitution. It a mind-bendingly anti-American, anti-Constitutional line of reasoning on display here.