Ex-white house aide Kash Patel presses view Trump broadly declassified documents

In May, former Trump administration official Kash Patel, as part of a lengthy scuffle with the National Archives, asserted that documents stored at Mar-a-Lago marked as classified had in fact been declassified by President Donald Trump as he left office in January 2021.

Since the FBI searched the former president’s Florida resort on Aug. 8, Mr. Patel has become a leading proponent of that view and one of the most vocal defenders of Mr. Trump in accusing the Justice Department of politically motivated overreach.

“The bottom line was he said this information has to get out to the American public,” Mr. Patel said in an interview Wednesday. Mr. Patel said he didn’t know what was in the boxes the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized earlier this month but believed prosecutors would have a hard time proving that the documents weren’t covered by Mr. Trump’s declassification orders.

Justice Department officials obtained a search warrant based on evidence that a crime might have been committed in the handling and possession of the documents. An inventory showed agents removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities. The contents of the classified material or what it pertains to haven’t been made public.

Officials have described the need for the document retrieval as a matter of protecting national-security secrets that shouldn’t be in the possession of a private citizen and held at a resort with foreign guests.

Mr. Patel, 42 years old, is a former White House and Pentagon aide whom Mr. Trump late in his term considered naming to top positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI, agencies that Mr. Trump criticized throughout his presidency. Mr. Patel is informally advising the Trump team’s legal response to the events at Mar-a-Lago and the retrieved documents.

In the last months of his administration, Mr. Trump issued several orders to declassify documents related to the 2016 FBI investigation into links between his campaign and Russia in the contest against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Mr. Patel said he witnessed additional verbal orders for a broad declassification directive in the administration’s waning days.

“It had to do with Russiagate. It had to do with the Hillary email scandal. It had to do with a whole lot of other stuff. And he said, ‘This is all declassified,’ ” Mr. Patel said.

Mr. Patel’s assertions seek to challenge a central tenet of the Justice Department’s position that urgent action was needed because highly sensitive national-security secrets were at risk.

There is no documented evidence of the president’s verbal declassification action. Mr. Patel said that doesn’t matter. “The president is the ultimate classification authority, so if he says it or writes it, it’s declassified,” he said.

Many legal experts dispute that, saying the president’s broad declassification powers need to follow a process that records the declassification of documents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said in a 2020 decision that “declassification, even by a President, must follow established procedures.” That court ruling related to whether Mr. Trump had declassified a covert CIA program by tweeting about it and by making other public statements.

The Justice Department’s priority in the search was securing the classified documents, people familiar with the investigation said. Their action followed a series of exchanges in recent months over the government’s interest in retrieving the documents, including a subpoena that prompted the June 3 handover of some materials at the property.

Mr. Patel said he wasn’t aware of the subpoena when he first told a conservative news site that Mr. Trump declassified broad sets of documents. He said the packing and delivery of materials from the Trump White House was the responsibility of the General Services Administration.

A GSA spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that it “entered into a support contract, in this particular instance, for shipping of the pallets from Virginia to Florida—not for the packing of the boxes.”

“The outgoing presidential transition team and their volunteers were responsible for packing items,” GSA added.

In June, the former president appointed Mr. Patel as a liaison to the National Archives over the delivery of presidential papers and other materials, along with conservative journalist John Solomon.

Whether the Justice Department pursues any criminal charges remains to be seen as investigators pore over the seized papers and assess the actions of those who had custody of them. And the classification status isn’t the only issue; laws cited in the search warrant prohibit the mishandling of material related to national defense, interference with federal investigations and concealing or destroying government records.

Mr. Patel’s comments suggest a theory of the case for the former president and his allies as they fault the investigation and the FBI’s actions. Many Republicans have criticized the search as excessive and designed to damage Mr. Trump’s political standing as he considers another run for the presidency in 2024; some have pressed the agency for more information.

Mr. Patel also accused the Justice Department of acting to prevent the release of some information Mr. Trump had declassified related to the Russia investigation, a probe that itself was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Mr. Mueller found evidence of Russian meddling in the election but didn’t establish any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Moscow’s efforts.

In 2018, Mr. Patel, as an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), oversaw a Republican House inquiry that found shortcomings in how the FBI sought to monitor former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Democrats disputed those conclusions at the time, but a 2019 Justice Department inspector-general report validated many of the allegations, finding the FBI had committed serious failures in seeking that surveillance. It prompted extensive changes at the bureau.

In October 2020, Mr. Trump tweeted he was declassifying Russia investigation material, but his action only delegated that authority to the attorney general. On the day before he left office, the president issued a memo declassifying that material, which still hasn’t been made public amid a review by the Justice Department. That memo refers only to a binder of information, however.

Mr. Patel alleges that the counterintelligence investigation that led to the August search of Mar-a-Lago was aimed at ensuring that those documents remain tied up in a continuing investigation, thereby reducing the likelihood that they will be released.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Patel, an early critic of the Russia investigation, joined Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff as senior director for counterterrorism. In 2020, he was a senior adviser to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and his successor, John Ratcliffe, helping lead efforts to remove senior career intelligence officers whom Mr. Trump felt didn’t support his efforts to pursue adversaries.

In the final months of the administration, as Mr. Trump fumed over his election defeat, Mr. Patel worked closely with him and remained with him after Mr. Trump left office, former officials said.

Mr. Trump considered installing Mr. Patel as head of the CIA during his final days, following a plan to install the loyalist at the FBI. The proposal to name him deputy FBI director was opposed by then-Attorney General William Barr, who told the president’s chief of staff it would happen “over my dead body,” according to Mr. Barr’s book “One Damn Thing After Another.”