Former Trump administration official Kash Patel defended former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents with the claim that “He can literally stand over a set of documents and say ‘these are now declassified.'”

Patel, formerly a Pentagon chief of staff, accompanied Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes for a Sunday joint interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. Nunes, for his part, scoffed at the idea that Trump could face obstruction of justice charges for the classified documents reportedly found at Mar-a-Lago, and he gave new air to the idea that FBI “planted” dirt on the former president by claiming the FBI’s investigation was “basically created out of whole cloth.”

Instead of running with the “planted” evidence theory popular in Trumpworld, Patel took a different approach as Bartiromo asked him about Trump’s past declassification of documents. As he touted that Trump declassified “whole sets of documents,” Patel stressed that “the key fact [is] President Trump, as a sitting president, is a unilateral authority for declassification.”

“He can literally hand over a set of documents and say ‘these are now declassified,'” Patel said. “That is done with definitive action immediately.”

Despite Patel’s claim, the Washington Post has pointed out there is a process that documents typically go through if the president chooses to publicly declassify certain information. This is done to make sure the declassification doesn’t create a national security risk, and its unclear whether this process was applied to the Mar-a-Lago documents. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman has also cast doubt on the claim that Trump declassified broad swaths of documents.

This all comes after Trump whined about the seizure of the documents after he previously cried “hoax” and suggested he was being framed. Instead of addressing any of that though, Patel railed at Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray by calling them “political hucksters” who “failed in their mission to uphold the law.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

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