As far as the Trump administration is concerned, there is government secrets, then government secrets.
What details did the federal court ask about the migrant's military flight that landed on a video camera that had been recorded arriving a few days ago? Sorry, the judge is too secret to reveal, even long after the facts.
Details of upcoming military strikes against the US enemy revealed by the president's top national security adviser in an unsecured group text chat? It's not classified, it's not a national security violation, it's not a big deal.
What constitutes the official secrets of this new era of Washington seems to depend on who is asking and who is speaking. The juxtaposition of two cases with sensitive information in the same week reinforces how situational President Trump's approach to government secrets becomes.
And it shows Trump's remarkable ability to bending political reality into his will without worrying about facts or consistency. After all, this is the president who made Canada and Europe an enemy rather than an allied person, rewrites history claiming that Ukraine started a war with Russia, and sends lawyers to court to assert that Elon Musk was not in charge of government efficiency.
This has become so common that there is a gap between what constitutes secrets without acknowledging too much of a gap. On the one hand, the Trump administration has invoked the so-called state secret privilege to rebel against federal judges trying to determine whether deportation without listening to immigrants is legal. Meanwhile, Trump dispelled a spectacular disclosure of planned attacks against Hooty militants in a group chat that mistakenly includes journalists in the signal on commercial platforms.
“What's confusing is the claim that pending military operations are not as sensitive in the end, but we cannot reveal the widely reported deportation facts that have already occurred,” said Stephen Aftergood, a federated American Federation of Scientists, who spent decades on government secret issues. “It's difficult to take secrets seriously as a national security tool when they are clearly manipulated for selfish political purposes.”
In both cases, the information at the heart of the problem is the timestamp. In the case of immigrants, Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the administration to tell him what time the planes that transported the gang members were supposed to have taken off the US soil, what time they left US space, and what time the immigrants had officially moved from US custody.
The judge hopes these details will determine whether the administration illegally violated an order that would turn the plane around. The administration says the information is too sensitive to give it to him.
In the case of Signal Chat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegses gave group chat colleagues (and journalists accidentally added to it) the exact time for US fighters and drones to hit the Hoosys a few hours ago.
Perhaps that information could have been of any help to those targeted if they had known it. But the White House and Heggs essentially say that the information was not really that sensitive.
“We've been saying that no material has been sent that is classified as this messaging thread,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said at this week's briefing. “There was no place, no source or method was revealed, and no war plans were certainly not discussed.”
She did not mention the time estimate. Instead, when Levitt was forced on them by reporters, Mr. Levitt changed the subject and attacked Democrats with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic Prime Minister, for making so much. She then attacked former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for the failed retreat from Afghanistan.
National Security Veterans of both parties scoffed at the allegations that the details Mr Hegses provided about the impending strike were not classified during group chats, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State, Secretary of State, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz.
“There's absolutely no way the information shared in that group chat is not categorized at the highest level,” says Oona Hathaway, a former Pentagon lawyer at Yale Law School. “I'm going to frankly try to suggest that no one is. Such details about impending military operations are exactly the kind of information that is most closely guarded.”
She added: “This is even more absurd in light of the government's claim that the state allows information from the district courts to withhold information on the aspects of immigration that have already arrived.”
The sensational secrets have usually caused serious investigations with potential criminal liability, but Attorney General Pam Bondy on Thursday appears to suggest she is not going to pursue the issue.
However, last week, Bondy's deputy Todd Blanche announced that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation leaking to the New York Times about Venezuelan gangster Tren de Aragua. Blanche said in his announcement that the leaked information is “inaccurate, but still categorized.” He did not explain how misinformation could be categorized.
Trump has always seen secret national security violations through who is committing the violation. He at least partially won the presidency in 2016, encouraging the other former Secretary of State by sending emails while in office, at least in part, using a volatile private server. He led the crowd with a chant “Keep Her in” and declared that when he was elected “No one beyond the law” when he was to endanger the secrets of the government.
But once he took office, Trump regularly ignored warnings about protecting government information. He posted sensitive satellite images of Iran online. He continued to use unsecured mobile phones even after being told they were being monitored by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. He tore the official documents and threw them on the floor despite laws requiring them to be preserved.
Most memorable, of course, when Trump left the White House in January 2021, he filmed confidential documents and kept them in his Margo property in his shower, office, bedroom and ballroom, and opposed to a subpoena that demanded that he return them. When special adviser Jack Smith later indicted him for handling his secrets, Trump deposed the incident as partisan persecution.
However, when it was discovered that Biden had classified documents at his Delaware home, Trump expressed that unlike Trump, Biden quickly reported his discoveries, returned the documents, and cooperated with investigators. “Trump was peanuts by comparison,” Trump declared at one point, referring to himself in a third party.
Even on Thursday, Trump's team returned to Whataboutism's defense, claiming in signal chats that disclosure of military operations was Burger compared to democratic crimes.
“If you want to talk about the classified information, talk about what happened at Hillary Clinton's home,” Bondy told reporters. “Tell us about the classified documents in Joe Biden's garage that Hunter Biden has access to.”
Investigators established that either emails sent or received by Mrs. Clinton on her private servers had no headings marking them as classified. Only after the facts were officials concluded that 110 emails in a chain of 30,000 emails contained information that was categorized when sent or received in 52 emails.
Nevertheless, it was sufficient to encourage the FBI's investigation, which did not result in criminal charges, but was embarrassing enough to help Mrs. Clinton take office. Similarly, Biden's special advisor's investigation did not result in any charges, but included the president's politically damaging characterization as “a poor older man with poor memories” and “a faded faculty of progress.”
Though Bondy didn't seem to have enough problems with the Trump team's disclosure of the attack plan to launch an investigation, her department went to court this week to protect the secrets of information that could politically and legally compromise the Trump administration.
Flight data for the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants will help Judge Boasberg figure out whether the administration can first decide whether exclusion is legal, ignoring the order to turn the plane.
Mr Bondy's department refused to comply, stating that it would “substantial dangers to national security and diplomacy.” It was not clear how it would be dangerous after the flight was over, but the administration included a declaration from Rubio. “It erodes the reliability of US guarantees into other countries.”
However, the Salvadoran government, which agreed to the Trump administration's request to accept and jail Venezuelan immigrants, had not tried to keep the matter a secret. Certainly, the country's president has posted a video of its arrival. Concealing the time of arrival seemed not to be a concern.
In an example of Washington's strangeness, the two cases converged in one way Thursday when the same judge Boasberg, who acted in another case filed in response to the Planned Attack Group Chat, ordered the Trump administration to comply with federal records laws to preserve all signal messages from March 11th to 15th.
“This administration is doing more to trust the secrets of national security than critics,” Aftergood said. “There has always been abuse and excess in official secret policies. But everyone has accepted that there are also true secrets, such as details of the imminent military operations, and the identity of the intelligence source.”
