Late Tuesday evening the New York Times reported that current and former U.S. officials claim that members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as well as other Trump associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” before the 2016 election. Donald Trump then spent the early morning Wednesday unhappily tweeting about this:

This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton's losing campaign. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

If in fact all of this is “non-sense,” Trump has the power as president to make that clear immediately — by declassifying all government intercepts of communications between Russian nationals and anyone in his orbit. The huge edifice of classification by the U.S. government has no basis in laws passed by Congress (with one small and, in this case, irrelevant exception.) Instead, the executive branch classifies material based on presidential executive orders, with the president’s power in turn based on his constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces. The Supreme Court has stated that the presidential power “to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from the constitutional investment of power in the president.” This means that Trump has the power to declassify anything he wants, right now. CNN has reported that he has already been briefed on the contacts between his associates and Russians. So in theory Trump could ask the National Security Agency and all the other U.S. intelligence agencies to give him all the relevant intercepts and post everything about them on the White House website this afternoon.