The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding details on the program, then sued when the CIA did not immediately respond. | Getty Images Judge: Trump tweet did not declassify CIA program for Syrian rebels The judge rejected arguments that Trump effectively confirmed the existence of the program when he used his Twitter account last July to counter a Washington Post story.

A tweet from President Donald Trump disputing aspects of a news report about a CIA program to aid Syrian rebels did not declassify the program or undermine the government’s legal authority to keep details about it secret, a federal judge ruled in an opinion released Monday.

U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Carter Jr. rejected arguments that Trump effectively confirmed the existence of the program when he used his Twitter account last July to counter a Washington Post story that reported Trump’s decision to end the effort and suggested that the move was a concession to Russian President Vladimir Putin.


“The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad,” Trump wrote, referring to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

A day after sending the tweet, Trump mentioned the Post story again. “That was not something that I was involved in, other than they did come and they suggested,” the president said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It turns out it’s — a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to. You know, they didn’t write the truthful story, which they never do.”

Armed with Trump’s statements, The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding details of the program, then sued when the CIA did not immediately respond.

The newspaper argued that Trump’s statements declassified the program, at least in broad strokes, nullifying the CIA’s position that it could neither confirm nor deny the reported $1 billion effort to provide Syrian rebels with arms, training and nonlethal assistance.

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However, Carter ruled that Trump’s statements were too ambiguous to waive the government’s right to withhold the information. The judge also went further, saying that even public discussion of the specific program by government officials was insufficient to declassify it or give a FOIA requester like the Times any additional legal leverage to obtain the information.

“Permitting courts to infer whether a President declassified information would transfer the President’s constitutional authority to declassify to the Judiciary, undermining the basic tenets of the separation of powers,” the judge wrote in his 20-page decision, dated Friday and released Monday. “Here, President Trump did not make an unequivocal statement, or any statement for that matter, indicating that he was declassifying information. This should end the inquiry.”

Carter’s opinion could be a hurdle for other litigants seeking to use Trump’s often undisciplined Twitter comments and other public remarks to force government agencies to release information they would normally withhold.

New York Times attorney David McCraw said the paper planned to appeal the decision.

“We are disappointed in the court’s decision,” McCraw said. “We think the case raises important issues about how classified information is handled by the government at the same time it is aggressively pursuing whistleblowers.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the ruling.

Trump’s statements were not the only ones at issue in the case. Speaking in Colorado two days after The Washington Post article, U.S. Special Operations Commander Gen. Tony Thomas defended the decision to end the program. The move was “absolutely not a sop to the Russians,” Thomas told the Aspen Security Forum. He went on to describe the program being ended as having what some would call an “impossible mission based on the approach we took.”

The judge, a Manhattan-based appointee of President Barack Obama, dismissed Thomas’ comments as “pontifications” and said they “lacked the detailed revelations” necessary to amount to official acknowledgment of the CIA program. Carter noted that at one point in his answer, Thomas said of the program: “I don’t know enough about it to criticize it.”

In January, a federal judge in Washington rejected a similar argument in a suit brought by a POLITICO reporter seeking access to records about the federal investigation into a dossier of intelligence reports, many of them unverified, about alleged ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia. That suit is continuing with a focus on the impact of Trump’s decision to formally declassify a House Intelligence Committee report discussing the same dossier.