The insubordination of the administrative state to Trump's orders
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Significantly, the president is the end of the line for whether material is classified or not. If he says it's not, then it isn't. With that declassification order in place, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sent a message to the Department of Justice asking the DOJ to release the documents as expeditiously as possible:
"I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied," Meadows wrote in the memo.
As Meadows's memo makes clear, the DOJ did not have the authority to refuse to release the documents. Its authority was limited to redacting that material that would improperly violate specific individuals' privacy. Instead, the DOJ did nothing at all.
Just The News discovered this deliberate inaction when it went to the National Archives seeking the binder in question. Instead, it learned from the National Archives that the binder never arrived, remaining instead in the DOJ's hands.
When Just The News interviewed Meadows, he said he wasn't surprised at all because the administrative state — which was supposed to report to the president — instead constantly thwarted him:
What would happen is he would have a directive, and then we would see, as people were leaving the Oval Office, you know, they were nodding compliance in the Oval Office, and the minute they go out, they said, "Well, we're not going to do that" or "We're going to find all the reasons not to do it." So I found that very often while I served as chief of staff, but also found that as a member of Congress, that many times we would go in and the president was all in on a transparency issue, only to find that many, whether they be at a particular agency or the Pentagon, they started pushing back.
In other words, presidents come and go, but the Swamp is forever — and it will report only to Democrat administrations.
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I am reminded of President Truman's statement after the election of Gen. Eisenhower was elected, "I can't wait for that General to get in here and give an order and nothing happens." Presidents come and go, but the administrative state goes on its merry way.
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