We keep talking about the stolen classified papers Trump took.
The real danger is what’s in the papers. It’s also in the highly classified knowledge the Trump Cabal picked up while they were in the White House. It’s a lot.
In the fall of 2020 before the election, I wrote some super naive stuff on my personal Facebook wall on posts and on comment threads.
I said I hoped and nearly expected that the US’ national security community was strong enough to push back against Mr. Trump if he tried to do a coup. I also thought that if he did, they would take him down immediately during or afterward - or if he took other clear actions that endangered US national security. I said back then that I thought the US government would come after Trump almost immediately when he was out of office anyway, given the number and type of spectacularly brazen crimes he’s committed. I said that the US government doesn’t take kindly to people who muck with US national security. We can see now with everything that’s unfolded since Trump left office that the rot and erosion is very deep in the government and the elected officials meant to oversee it.
By the fall of 2020, we already knew a ton about the Trump Team’s crimes and national security vulnerabilities. I’d just been hoping we collectively cared more about that stuff and would have done more about it, especially before now - 18 months later.
We already knew by that point that Trump had told a Russian Ambassador stuff that had been classified that wasn’t even our country’s intel to share. He had off-the-record meetings with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. We knew some of what he did because he said it out loud, like “Russia, if you’re listening…”
We knew that Donald Trump would never in a million years have gotten even a Confidential level security clearance without having been elected to that access - let alone the highest clearance in the US. He had access to the deepest and biggest secrets the US has.
We knew that Trump’s people didn’t qualify for security clearances either - yet he made sure they got them. They overrode the security clearance process, and it was allowed to happen.
We knew that Trump’s team casually shared the President’s Daily Brief (PDF) around the White House; not following protocols for who could access it and where. The PDB is the highest-level collection of all the high-priority intelligence and national security information a rational and sane president of the world’s most powerful superpower would need on any given day. If you’re wondering - yes, that is the daily document the intel staff ended up making into pictures and graphs so that Trump would actually even read it occasionally. But his people read it - including some of the ones who hadn’t passed the background check process but got overrides. That alone is a spectacular vulnerability.
We knew that Trump used his personal cell phone throughout his administration, and the cell phones of others around him. He did that instead of using the US government’s multi-million dollar secure communications system to counter foreign attempts to listen to the conversations of the US President, often considered the most powerful position in the world. We also know that Chinese intelligence and likely others were camped around the White House area picking up that signals intelligence.
Even with all that in mind, I still thought the government’s institutions were less damaged by Trump than what turned out to be the case.
I knew that authoritarian-wannabes erode and destroy institutions, but I honestly thought our national security posture, agencies, and political posture was way tighter.
Clearly, it wasn’t.
This is obvious in the insurrection and coup attempt that occurred after the election on January 6, 2021. Both of which were enabled by the Trump Administration. Some of it was a long time coming.
For example, early on in 2017 Trump and Company got rid of or weakened agency components in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that tracked domestic violent extremists. After the mostly-peaceful nationwide protests following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump and his DHS dismantled capabilities to analyze and track domestic violent extremist (DVE) activity, and to send alerts and advisories on it to state and local law enforcement. It was a perfect set-up for weakening institutional capacity in the lead-up to the insurrection and coup.
In the immediate lead-up to the insurrection, intelligence-sharing about a clear threat that was obvious even in the public domain was not acted upon in ways the government was supposed to have prepared to do. For example, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf made a deliberate decision not to declare January 6 a National Security Special Event (NSEE) although it totally met the parameters. That would have given Congress similar protection on January 6 to that of like the State of the Union (SOTU) address, or of a major high-profile event like the Super Bowl.
The lists of this stuff go on and on.
And of course: there’s everything the Trump Administration didn’t do to help with immediate response during the insurrection, what they did to actively make it worse as it was happening, and then the post-insurrection lack of response and follow-up. Acting DHS Secretary Wolf appeared to have resigned just after the insurrection and coup attempt not out of protest because it happened, but rather because news was coming out about how he was actively blocking or interfering with interagency and state and local government response activities during and after the January 6 incident.
And then we had Trump basically continue to throw a perpetual fit of denial that he would no longer be president after the 2021 inauguration, to the point where we saw photos on the day of the move of boxes and boxes of documents sitting outside the White House to be moved.
Wait… what?
What was in those boxes? We haven’t had much collective national discussion about what could have been in those boxes.
Most of us have heard the reports by now that the National Archives have been trying to recover at least some of that material since Trump absconded with it on January 20, 2021.
We know they got some of it back. We know a lot of it - if not all - was classified. We know we’re not likely to know what it was for that reason. We know the government may or may not ever know what all of the material was that Trump took. We don’t know how much tracking was in place for classified material that was accessed and printed through classified systems.
We assume there was at least some tracking capacity, as the National Archives and the DOJ were able to have a sense for at least some of what was taken. We might assume that other agencies also had some awareness of what was taken, although those agencies may not be listed partly because of the potential nature of the content. Was it the US Department of Energy (DOE)? The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)? The National Security Agency (NSA)? Any other components of the US Intelligence Community (IC)?
We know that Trump will claim that as president, he did have declassification authority - but no protocol was followed to properly de-classify the stacks of stuff he took. So there’s all of that, and the pundit class has been covering it this week.
It will be hard for the American public to understand the nuance and specificity of the declassification process, and how Trump didn’t follow it. His braying about how he had the authority to de-classify stuff is likely to be as powerful to his followers as his trumpeting of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
We don’t do so well talking about with risk that’s terrifying.
What we’re not hearing as much about is how much damage Trump and Company could do with not just the piles of papers they stole, but also with the knowledge they have having sat deep in the dead center of the biggest secrets of the world’s most powerful superpower.
What could they have been doing with that knowledge while they were in office, and what have they been doing since?
Russian & Saudi Risk
Jared Kushner got a $2 billion contract with the Saudis, and we know Trump was tight with Saudia Arabia too. He had no problem dancing around with the Saudi leadership and their magical sphere on his first-ever international trip as president. He had promised to release classified information on Saudi Arabia’s potential involvement in 9/11 during the campaign, but then perhaps not-so-mysteriously changed his mind after that trip.
The list of Trump’s ties with Putin and Russia is spectacular. There’s no point to creating a comprehensive list here; that is the stuff of books and theses. The connections go back decades. Some of the most deeply troubling ones include Trump’s attempt to strongarm Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy by refusing to send weapons to Ukraine in exchange for supposed dirt on now-President Joe Biden and his people.
Trump’s off-the-record conversations with Putin while in office remain unknown; although Congress could subpoena the interpreter to learn more. The Mueller Report documents extremely disturbing ties between Trump and Russia in the 2016 campaign - most of which the American public is not well aware of because of how the report was released and the attention it didn’t get by government or politicians when it came out. But the ties between Trump, Trump’s Cabal, and Russia are deep and wide.
That’s just two countries where Trump could be sending or selling classified information. And we have no idea what other funky stuff he did while he was in office that could have weakened US national security.
What is he doing with this stuff, and with the knowledge he has? What are his associates doing with it?
News has broken in the last 24 hours that some of this information may have been about US nuclear capabilities and assets. That’s pretty serious stuff, and terrifying all on its own if it’s been shared with any of our enemies - whether they are nation-states, or terrorist groups.
More Risks… & Vulnerabilities
Trump and Company had access to the deepest and most serious US military capabilities and vulnerabilities. They would know our weaknesses and missing pieces, our cutting-edge technologies, and our intelligence capabilities. They know our intelligence-gathering, counter-intelligence, and counter-terrorism capabilities; our reconnaissance capacity; and where and how we do those things.
Trump and Company had access to our domestic law enforcement and intelligence gathering machines as well. They would know how we surveil, track, and prosecute domestic violent extremist groups that Trump is so enamorate of, and who helped pull off the insurrection part of the coup attempt.
Trump and Company had access to our deepest Continuity of Government (COG) and Continuity of Operations Program (COOP) protocols, processes, and facilities. COG is about continuity of constitutional US government, and COOP is about essential government functions and capabilities. They would know about critical sites, capabilities of those sites, bug-out protocols, critical communications and alternative communications, and orders of succession (although much succession info is public). They could easily give our enemies classified information on National Essential Functions and related cascading functions that have been identified as critical to our functioning and continuity as a country. They could have given insurrectionists information on COG procedures for Congress as well prior to the insurrection. We don’t know if the January 6th Committee or the DOJ are looking into these possibilities.
This could all mean that we the American citizens don’t know anything about what the US government has identified as critical to our functioning and survival as a country, but some of our enemies might.
If a country or terrorist group was able to gain access to some of these key capabilities or locations, how much could they further weaken us?
Russia has already done significant damage to our social cohesion and health by creating disinformation and amplifying divisive online content in the 2016 election and since, by contributing to voter suppression through those same efforts, and by amplifying anti-public health disinformation especially in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
How much information could Russia or others have now about information deemed critical to our continuity of constitutional government?
One thing we have learned through Russia’s war with Ukraine is that some of its capabilities are perhaps less robust than previously understood. That being said, Russia still plays a long game - and other countries do, too. Russia’s intelligence inroads and connections with the current Republican party and affiliates such as the NRA are significant, and didn’t happen overnight. Russia seeks to weaken the US in order to gain more power itself around the world. China wouldn’t mind gaining more power around the world, either. Their cyber-attack capacities tend to include pilfering intellectual property and technical know-how from US companies and the government.
The bad thing about being the big superpower out there is that you’re a target, and we are.
Cyber & Infrastructure
Since 9/11, the US has massively overhauled it’s cybersecurity and infrastructure protection capabilities and partnerships. We’ve got enormous public-private-partnerships with private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure. The private sector owns much of the US’ critical infrastructure, and has partnered with the federal government about where it is, what’s critical, and how we can protect it. This includes everything from our communications like phone companies to energy, to our healthcare systems, to our financial sector, and to things like dams and chemical production.
The private sector has shared much of its vulnerable information with the US government, and some of this is classified. Foreign enemies knowing even some of this information could do tremendous damage to the US economy and its stability.
What We Can Do
Part of what we can do is to understand these risks, to talk about them, and to demand that politicians, government, and media ask questions about some of it. Republicans are already acting like what Trump has already done is in some equivalent to Secretary Clinton’s unfortunate email mismanagement. It’s nothing like that at all.
The Trump Cabal has an incredible and vast array of highly sensitive and highly classified information - and we’ll never know even a little bit of what it is that they know and what they’ve done with it.
We can know enough to ask the questions, and to demand that we do more with this risk. Trump and his people are in a position to do incredible damage to the United States. We should be talking more about that - and in all the ways. It’s part of raising a ruckus and driving the narrative.
We’ll be doing more with this at Shift the Country in the next few weeks. We’ll have some events where we talk more about national security, and get into how to talk about it. Subscribe to this Substack if you haven’t already to hear about when these events will happen.
You can also share this around… either by passing forward the email, or by sharing the article posted on Substack.
Keep the faith - in us, and in this democracy. Things are going to be getting more and more intense over the next few months. There are things we can do.
Along these same lines…this may be of interest.
https://www.stonekettle.com/2022/08/loose-lips-sink-ships.html?fbclid=IwAR3-0LWP-hYEcrF3PRn28kv5ERXmCRCiHJ6eYXhrC_SYAPxBWNpbhv6_d40