As President he has the plenary power to take and declassify any document he wants. And it doesn't require some special permission by some low level flunky at Archives. If Trump says they're declassified, then they are. Period. End of discussion.
That doesn’t answer the question “why did you take them?”
And but also doesn’t answer the question is that in the three legal charges likely pending against former President Trump he’s not absolved of that at all with what you state.
Further they were apparently not properly reclassified , you don’t wave a magic wand, there was nothing done as far as the report so far in terms of proper reporting to other agencies, storage, retagging, control logs, etc.… That’s bullshit they’re just saying after the fact … And on top of that 18 former national security personnel at the senior level (all Republicans appointed) and most of them Trump White House emeriti, have stated as of just week they have never heard of such a “magic wand”
procedure being done, repeat NEVER. Furthermore although the Presidential Records Act states that an incumbent President may “dispose of records that no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value,” the disposal is only permitted after “views of the Archivist of the United States on the proposed disposal have been obtained in writing.”
Again. I challenge you:
As a private citizen, are those documents his personal property or the property of The Archivist and in turn the property of the People of the United States?
It can’t be both.