Here in interesting Time Magazine article on classification from 2017. I wonder if they feel the same today:
https://archive.ph/2022.09.24-004744/https:/time.com/4780593/president-trump-russia-declassified/
An excerpt:
Timothy Naftali, Clinical Associate Professor of History and Public Service at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, goes all the way back to the Constitution and the basic structure of power in the United States.
“The president is the ultimate authorizing authority,” as he puts it.
The power to classify and declassify information — like the duty to protect intelligence sources and methods — has been reshaped several times over the course of American history, but the two powers are linked. The person or agency that has the right to keep something secret (or the successor agency, if original agency no longer exists) is the same one that has the right to decide when it should be made public. The hierarchical structure of government means that, in general, if a person has that power, so do her direct superiors, all the way up the chain. The President, at the top of the ladder, is everyone’s superior.
A concise explanation of what’s going on can be found in
this 1974 Indiana Law Journal article about executive power and national security, by Charles R. Nesson: “Technically any official has authority to declassify any information classified by people subordinate to him.
Thus when the President speaks, whether to the nation, to a reporter in private, or to a friend over cocktails, he automatically declassifies as he goes. There is no procedure, no paperwork. The same is true for other officials so long as they do not stray from the pyramids of classified information which have been generated beneath them.”
