Department of the Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518 (1988)

“The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States’” according to Article II of the Constitution, the court’s majority wrote. “His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”

It’s been generally accepted that the president is not subject to his own executive orders because he can change them at will

The official documents governing classification and declassification stem from executive orders. But even these executive orders aren’t necessarily binding on the president. The president is not “obliged to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed,” Aftergood said. “And he can change those.”

As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy wrote.

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Hey, that’s pretty neat! Let me try:

Heading 1 The New York Times, et al., v. Central Intelligence Agency (2020)

Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures. Moreover, courts cannot “simply assume, over the well-documented and specific affidavits of the CIA to the contrary,” that disclosure is required simply because the information has already been made public.

The Shiner affidavits, in addition to justifying the two FOIA exemptions, expressly stated that no declassification procedures had been followed with respect to any documents pertaining to the alleged covert program.

Moreover, the Times cites no authority that stand for the proposition that the President can inadvertently declassify information and we are aware of none. Because declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures, that argument fails.

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