Just to end the nonsense about Hillary’s declassification authority because even people who should know better don’t. On Friday Buck Sexton who apparently was a classification officer in the CIA said she didn’t have declassification authority and Bongino continues this falsehood even today and so I decided to once and for all I am attaching E.O. 11652. I tried to just download the pertinent sections but couldn’t so the whole thing is here but just skip down to section two where you will see who has original classification authority and you will find that the Secretary of State listed.
And then skip to section three and you will see that she had the authority to declassify anything she classified or anything classified by a subordinate.
And you might ask why I chose that E O and it’s just the one that I remembered the number for, but I guarantee it has been amended many times but the basic first two sections are basically the same. As a quick example this order referred to the Atomic Energy Commission and then had to be amended to replace AEC with NRC and ERDA and then again when DOE came into being and ERDA vanished. Listen every president puts out a new order tweaking the previous one but the basics don’t change.