j.r. leonard

That’s probably not a felony. Likely, the president has ultimate authority over what constitutes an official weather report Just like presidents can’t be guilty of disclosing classified information bc the president decides how things get classified

Maybe? I think there's a reasonable logic behind giving the president final authority to declassify things while not giving him final authority on weather reports. They are really, really different things

The law was written with the idea that the President would exercise judgment about declassifying things with an eye towards the public benefit (balancing the needs of diplomacy, security, and public dialogue) rather than grift, personal pettiness, or recklessness.

I think it’s more basic than that. The authority to classify belongs to the president and is exercised through his designates. I imagine (but don’t know) that most functions of the executive work the same way

It's plausible to me that a competent president might face a situation where he knows the right thing to do is to declassify something; he has the whole picture. It's not plausible to me that there is a situation in which the right thing to do is to change a weather forecast