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.[1]
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.”[1]
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.”[2]
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.”[2]
The question of who should have prevented it he treats separately, and puts on the National Security Adviser — see H. R. McMaster.[3]