Declassifying for a foreign government
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Declassifying for a foreign government is the procedure John Kiriakou set out in May 2017, when asked to compare a president's release of classified material with his own prosecution for releasing unclassified material.

His starting concession is that the authority is not in question. A president may declassify. What he disputes is that the authority dispenses with the method: "there's a process that you go through to declassify that information. You can't just blurt it out to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador."

The procedure

The report goes back to the CIA, to the office that originated it. That office pulls the relevant information out of the report, puts it on a new blank sheet of paper, and types at the top "Secret, releasable to Russia."

Kiriakou lists three things the extra step buys, and they are not procedural niceties but the entire point of it: "that way nobody gets in trouble, no sources and methods are revealed, everybody's happy, and we can establish something of a liaison relationship to the Russians." The intelligence still reaches the foreign service; what does not reach it is any trace of who collected the intelligence or how. His verdict on the Oval Office meeting follows in one sentence: "that's not what the president did."

The question of who should have prevented it he treats separately, and puts on the National Security Adviser, see H. R. McMaster.

See also

- Hr Mcmaster
- Donald Trump
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Over-classification
- Sergey Lavrov
