An apocryphal story tells of a seasoned CIA analyst who explains the classification system to a newbie. “I can tell UNCLASSIFIED from CONFIDENTIAL, CONFIDENTIAL from SECRET, and SECRET from TOP SECRET; but I can’t tell TOP SECRET from front-page news in The New York Times.”
As a former intelligence officer, I know that some classifications are puzzling. One SECRET cable to my unit in Vietnam had, among other recipients, the Pentagon and the White House. It read, “The U Dong VC battalion attended a wedding.” (Was President Johnson supposed to send the bride a present?) The classification may have been given to protect the source. If the VC knew that we knew of the wedding, they would know that we had an informer in the vicinity. But, in a war without front lines, the VC would suspect the possibility of informers everywhere.
Most classifications are not puzzling. A year earlier, at my first duty station, I had charge of a small intelligence unit. Late one afternoon, a truck with armed guards pulled up outside my facility unexpectedly. It held a large number of sealed boxes marked TOP SECRET. My unit received them because it alone had enough on-base space to store this material overnight in its transit elsewhere. But it lacked a secure vault. The four guards, who meant any and all business, unloaded the truck, stored the boxes, set up round-the-clock shifts outside the storage room, retrieved the boxes, loaded the truck, and left to transport the TS material to its final destination—all by the book, paperwork included.
Years later, some of my consulting work involved national defense matters across a range of subjects: submarines, tanks, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (derisively, “Star Wars Program”), and nuclear weapons. I had DOD TS and DOE Q (Restricted Data) clearances, and, with the latter, a CNWDI (Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information) clearance. CNWDI is not information for Trivial Pursuits.
So I have a dog in the fight. We are in an entirely different and extremely dangerous situation because Trump, for motives still unknown, retained possession of hundreds of pages of classified documents and transported them to his private residence in Florida. They were not protected in transport or storage. Even documents not missing or stolen may have been compromised. They were in areas visited by who knows which and how many people, and whom they knew. Those with iPhones could have photographed them, sent pictures, yet left no sign of compromised security. Trump has an iPhone, and he uses it. In short, he may already have damaged, or enabled damage to, national security.
That a malign narcissist or sociopath, norm- and law-breaker, and draft dodger had and kept access to TS, Q, and SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) documents—all of it NDI (National Defense Information)—, even while he was in office, scares me for the sake of this country. The only classification which mattered to Trump was his 4F for bone spurs. No one should think that a leak of NDI is little or no worse than Trump’s talk about groping women, his loser’s lies about a stolen election, or Republican melt-downs about government “overreach” or Hillary-too nonsense. Republicans who, for political motives, minimize the risks of compromised DNI and consequent threats to national security do not realize that these threats exempt neither political party from harm. Trump-Is-Savior devotees—typical is a draft-dodging, flag-waving neighbor with a GED from Fox News—who see great harm in a court-authorized FBI search to recover and protect the country’s national defense secrets are, to put it bluntly, traitors-in-waiting, regardless of whether this country continues as a constitutional democracy or becomes a White Christian nation and bastion against all others.
Since 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency, many people, especially Republican politicians and voters, have had opportunities to stop him. Congressional Republicans had two chances to support impeachment; instead, they put loyalty to Trump and their party above loyalty to the country and the Constitution, and fidelity to their oath of office. The electorate stopped him in 2020. They have since opposed a House investigation into his attempted coup to prevent the transfer of the presidency to his duly elected successor. The question is whether the electorate will stop Trump, his clones—among other unworthies, Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz—, and his base in 2022 and 2024 despite Republican schemes to rig these elections.
Every vote, up and down the ballot, in these elections is for or against democracy and national security. Voters must recognize the even greater peril in which a second Trump presidency or a Republican presidency of a smarter clone would place this country. Any GOP president would want to entrench and expand anti-democratic election procedures, terminate the investigation into the 6 January attempted coup, initiate investigations (harassments) of political foes, pervert federal law enforcement agencies, and disregard Trump’s breaches of national security. If voters do not recognize and reject candidates who would support such efforts, they will have no grounds to complain if Republicans undermine America’s best ideals by indulging their worst instincts and effectuating their full-fascist intentions.
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