Fox News contributor Sean Duffy asserted on Sunday that former President Donald Trump had the authority to take ownership of any government document by declaring it unclassified.
During an appearance on Fox & Friends, Duffy complained about the FBI seizing classified and other sensitive government documents from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.
"The view of the FBI and DOJ seeing evidence of crime is very broad," he argued. "I mean, the fact that they went and took top secret classified documents. By the way, remember Hillary Clinton had classified documents on her server that weren't marked classified."
"Donald Trump can take a classified document, marked classified, and say this is now unclassified, I'm taking it with me," he claimed. "So just because it has a marking on it doesn't mean that it's classified."
Trump supporters have not presented any evidence that the former president declassified the documents. But it may not matter because the search warrant used at Mar-a-Lago did not hinge on document classification.
"The claim is also irrelevant to Mr. Trump’s potential troubles over the document matter because none of the three criminal laws cited in a search warrant as the basis of the investigation depend on whether documents contain classified information," The New York Times reported.
