The Trump Team Has a Double Standard on State Secrets

State secrets are necessary, no matter who is president, because safeguarding certain kinds of information stops America’s enemies from doing us harm. They are also fraught, because when executive-branch officials can hide the truth, many abuse that power to cover up misdeeds.

This tests the virtue of any administration—a test that Donald Trump’s administration is failing. Its officials have recently betrayed a ludicrous double standard: They would have the public believe that the exact times at which F-18s will take off to attack an enemy and bomb its target are not classified, even prior to an attack, but also that, long after alleged undocumented immigrants are deported, national security demands that the time their deportation flights took off should remain secret. In short, they treat sensitive information with scandalous carelessness while invoking state secrets to hide facts that endanger no one.

The first of these matters concerns a U.S. military attack on Houthi fighters in Yemen last month. There is an obvious national-security interest in keeping attack plans secret: Doing so better protects American service members and makes their missions more likely to succeed. One struggles to think of any occasion when classifying and closely guarding information is more justified.

But Trump officials failed to safeguard the attack plans. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported last week, White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz created a group chat on Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app, to discuss the attack on the Houthis—and inadvertently included Goldberg in the chat. Later, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, used the chat to tell its 17 other members exactly when American war planes would take off and when American bombs would hit enemy targets. He did this even though many of the people on the chat seemingly had no need for such specific information, and even though sharing it on a group chat risked a security breach—as illustrated by Goldberg’s inclusion and the fact that none of the officials seemed to notice his presence.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

Critics argued that the content of the group chat was both illegal and irresponsible––illegal because it would seem to violate laws that dictate how sensitive national-security information must be handled, and irresponsible because if the information in the group chat had reached America’s enemies, the lives of the pilots and their mission could’ve been endangered. “Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information, and they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink ships,” Democratic Representative Jim Himes said at a congressional hearing last week.

The Trump administration rejected such critiques. Before The Atlantic published the contents of the group chat, Hegseth downplayed the sensitivity of the information that he’d shared with the group. And Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who was also included in the chat, testified under oath that the information wasn’t classified. “There were no sources, methods, locations, or war plans that were shared,” Gabbard said. Even after The Atlantic made the texts public, the White House insisted that the material was not classified, to the bafflement of many national-security experts, who well know that far less sensitive information is routinely classified and that if attack plans weren’t, they should have been.

The Trump administration has taken a sharply contrasting approach to state secrets in the second matter: its deportation of scores of people to a brutal prison in El Salvador, despite an order from U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg to halt the deportations. The Trump administration claims that all the deportees are foreign gang members. Attorneys and family members of some of the men say that the government is wrong, and that they never got a chance to contest the facts. Facing a lawsuit by the ACLU and challenges from attorneys representing various detainees, the administration has argued that Boasberg’s order was not applicable, because it came down when the detainees were already outside U.S. airspace. In response, Boasberg demanded to know exactly when the two planes had taken off and left U.S. airspace, and when the detainees on board had been transferred from American to Salvadoran authorities.

Yet rather than answer the judge, Trump-administration officials invoked the state-secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that forecloses adjudicating some matters in court because disclosing the information at issue would purportedly threaten national security. In a notice filed last week, the administration argued that “confirming the exact time the flights departed, or their particular locations at some other time, would facilitate efforts to track those flights and future flights,” endangering the Americans operating them. They made this claim despite the fact that administration officials had already commented publicly about the location of the flights at the time that the judge’s order was issued, and despite the fact that future flights needn’t take off at the same time.

[Isaac Stanley-Becker and Jonathan Lemire: The double standard at the center of the Signal debacle]

Every president in my lifetime has abused the state-secrets privilege. Still, I find this juxtaposition striking, and the administration’s positions disingenuous and indefensible. Government officials have every reason to closely guard the exact timing of a future military strike, and there is no civic benefit to sharing it. Meanwhile, there is no reason to closely guard the timing of a past deportation flight, and obvious civic benefit to clarifying it in response to a lawful judicial inquiry. Yet in both cases, the Trump team chose what was costly to the national interest, but possibly beneficial to their political interests, as they attempted to obfuscate the degree to which they’d behaved carelessly or, potentially, unlawfully.

Mark Twain said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, but your government only when it deserves it.” In this matter, the Trump administration is neither patriotic nor deserving of support.