"So the government controls over classified documents are so bad that classified records could be missing that they still don’t know about"
Well, yeah. Lots of classified documents are not individually tracked. Nearly everything exists first in soft copy, and is later printed out if there's a need for a hard copy.
"President Trump could have considered them personal records, with the notes reflecting his own thought process about them"
If these documents are unique, it's only because somebody hand wrote something on them. Any hard copy someone handed to POTUS was now POTUS property and he was free to write all over it. And he was free to declassify it (although it seems they are not claiming that he did?) and it was a presidential record under PRA. This whole thing is going to fall apart.
If, as you say, "nearly everything exists first in soft copy," presumably because classified documents, like most other documents these days, are first created on computers, then it's unlikely that President Trump would have any documents that the government doesn't already have a copy of, and the idea that he's denying them "access" to anything is ridiculous. Presumably too, the printers connected to classified systems are logged, so that the government should know how many hard copies there are.
President Trump's attorneys are understandably reluctant to make any factual assertions about declassification of any specific documents because they haven't seen which documents are among the 100 or so that were seized. And now with the 11th Circuit ruling, it seems unlikely that they will find out, unless President Trump can invoke his statutory right of access under the Presidential Records Act.
"So the government controls over classified documents are so bad that classified records could be missing that they still don’t know about"
Well, yeah. Lots of classified documents are not individually tracked. Nearly everything exists first in soft copy, and is later printed out if there's a need for a hard copy.
"President Trump could have considered them personal records, with the notes reflecting his own thought process about them"
If these documents are unique, it's only because somebody hand wrote something on them. Any hard copy someone handed to POTUS was now POTUS property and he was free to write all over it. And he was free to declassify it (although it seems they are not claiming that he did?) and it was a presidential record under PRA. This whole thing is going to fall apart.
If, as you say, "nearly everything exists first in soft copy," presumably because classified documents, like most other documents these days, are first created on computers, then it's unlikely that President Trump would have any documents that the government doesn't already have a copy of, and the idea that he's denying them "access" to anything is ridiculous. Presumably too, the printers connected to classified systems are logged, so that the government should know how many hard copies there are.
President Trump's attorneys are understandably reluctant to make any factual assertions about declassification of any specific documents because they haven't seen which documents are among the 100 or so that were seized. And now with the 11th Circuit ruling, it seems unlikely that they will find out, unless President Trump can invoke his statutory right of access under the Presidential Records Act.