What you or I "believe" is not relevant.. You keep letting your belief get in the way of constitutional authority and judicial precedent. Your refusal to acknowledge the plane English of a federal judge is really disturbing. I think you should appeal her decision in the court. Show 'em how it's done.
Then, once you get that pesky and unchallenged ruling out of the way, you can set the Supreme Court and legal and constitutional analysts straight, too.
The
majority ruling in the 1988 Supreme Court
case Department of Navy vs. Egan — which addressed the legal recourse of a Navy employee who had been denied a security clearance — addresses this line of authority.
"The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States’" according to Article II of the Constitution, the court’s majority wrote. "His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant."
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, said that such authority gives the president the authority to "classify and declassify at will."
In fact, Robert F. Turner, associate director of the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law, said that "if Congress were to enact a statute seeking to limit the president’s authority to classify or declassify national security information, or to prohibit him from sharing certain kinds of information with Russia, it would raise serious separation of powers constitutional issues."
The official documents governing classification and declassification stem from executive orders. But even these executive orders aren’t necessarily binding on the president. The president is not "obliged to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed," Aftergood said. "And he can change those."
Indeed, the controlling executive order has been rewritten by multiple presidents. The current version of the order was
issued by President Barack Obama in 2009.
The national-security experts at the blog
Lawfare wrote in the wake of the Post’s revelation that the "infamous
comment" by President Richard Nixon — that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" — "is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them. The nature of the system is that the president gets to disclose what he wants."
This isn't a L v R thing for me, my thing is people v Federal Government. The President has that SOLE discretion and power and he will soon be gone, either by vote or term limit. The Bureaucracy is on and on, and on. It is important that the people keep control of the executive branch by voting and redelegating that authority.
Why do you have so much trust in NARA and appointed Bureaucrats? We don't even know who these people truly are.
Again, look beyond your hate for Trump, try to understand why the President has such unlimited authority over the executive branch.
ps. your refusal to acknowledge legal precedents that I post does not qualify as my "not answering" your questions.
