Ex-White House officials including 2 former chiefs of staff dispute Trump's claim he declassified docs found at Mar-a-Lago: 'Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given'

The documents were found at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI search of Trump's home. According to a CNN exclusive, 18 of his former top officials think the claim is a complete fiction.

According to Trump and his allies, he had a standing order to declassify the documents he took from the White House after he left office.

At a time when the Justice Department has publicly confirmed it's in the midst of an unprecedented federal criminal investigation of the former president, many of the officials who spoke to CNN did so under the guise of anonymity.

John Kelly and Mick Mulvaney, the White House chiefs of staff, told CNN that they never heard of any such order.

Kelly, who was the chief of staff from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, told CNN that there was nothing approaching an order that foolish. I don't think anyone that worked at the White House after me would have allowed that order to go forward, even if they wanted to stop it.

During his time as chief of staff, Mulvaney was unaware of any standing orders.

According to CNN's Jamie Gangel, Elizabeth Stuart, and Jeremy Herb, a number of former national security and intelligence officials have tenures that equate to the total length of Trump's time as commander in chief. The officials they talked to had some knowledge of the declassification process.

A former national security adviser to the president says there was no standing order.

When he was the national security advisor, he was not briefed on that. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't see it in action.

An anonymous source familiar with the process of declassifying documents and White House records told the outlet that the claim was laughable and that it was Trump's best kept secret. A number of sources laughed at the idea and a senior administration official called it bullshit.

The 18 officials who spoke to CNN all agreed that this is not the way documents are declassified at the White House.

A former senior Trump White House official said that the president cannot just wave a magic wand and declassify.

One source, who was familiar with how Trump operated, told CNN that the former president was told that it was not possible to declassify any documents at any time.

Some of the documents were marked "top secret" and were taken by the FBI from Trump's estate.