Republicans advance new theory: If Trump even thought about doing it, it is legal

Remember back when the presidential team of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney exploited the war on terror to push their vision of an imperial presidency, the “unitary executive” theory? The president, they argued, has ultimate authority over the whole of the executive branch and is restricted only by the U.S. Constitution as the judiciary interprets it. Bush, Cheney, and their band of ghouls used it to justify warrantless surveillance of Americans and the torture of detainees. They used it to set up an extralegal detention system at Guantanamo Bay, where detainees still exist in legal limbo. Bush & Co. at least tried to put an official gloss on their actions. They had a whole legal team inside of the White House writing memos to justify war crimes, dotting every “i” and crossing every “t.”

Turns out they needn’t have bothered with all that, because the new theory of the unitary executive says that if a (Republican) president thinks about doing a thing, wants to do that thing, it’s as good as done. At least when it comes to declassifying critical national security documents about nuclear stuff and putting them in the hotel safe in your bedroom to show to off to all of the totally not foreign intelligence agents who are guests at your resort. No, really.

“As the facts stand now, his defense would be, ‘I declassified those documents. I am not therefore in possession of classified documents now,’” said Charles Stimson, a senior fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former federal prosecutor. The Heritage Foundation, that stalwart Republican establishment think tank and policy center. Stimson says that Trump was “the ultimate declassification authority.” And he could do it all by himself. He didn’t even have to do it. He just had to think it.

“If any president decides to declassify a document and doesn’t tell anybody—but he has made the decision to declassify something—then the document is declassified,” Stimson said. He added that “there’s a rich debate about whether or not a document is declassified if a president has decided but not communicated it outside of his own head.” No. There is not a rich debate. This is bullshit.