What would a clerk be doing having access to packing top secret national security documents in random wrong boxes in the first place? One document can be a page or 1,000 pages, and all it takes is the one which gives away nuclear or strategic secrets. This is not a matter of quantity of paper but CIRCUMSTANCES. Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and his green fucking corvette or chinese-paid storage office have ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING CLEARANCE AT ALL TO TAKE A FUCKING ASHTRAY FROM THE WH OR SENATE, much less the authority to declassify anything and be holding them in such obviously compromised conditions.
Uh quantity and circumstances make all the difference.
It's why the guy with a single joint is going to get a pass, but the guy with bails of Pot in his garage packed up for sale is going to prison for a long time.
What is pretty clear is that these were very small amounts of pages, given no one was actually looking for them or realized they were missing.
When was that EO issued by Trump and do we have a copy? What, No? Declassification is a process. The person doing the declassification has to submit them to the agency that issued the document, an assessment has to be made, and then and only then can they be declassified. Trump can't declassify them with his mind.LOL
As POTUS Trump could declassify anything at any time just by removing them from the White House per EO's by GW Bush and Øbama. Which is what he did.
Trump, like Øbama before him, had his people negotiating with the Archive and had already returned some. Merrick Garland decided to play politics, pure and simple.
Yeah, well, that didn't include lying about having them as Trump did when his people signed an affadavit saying he returned them and still had boxes.