The intelligence whistleblower whose complaint has triggered an impeachment showdown says the Trump administration abused a highly classified computer system in order to hide President Trump’s attempts to get dirt on Joe Biden’s family from Ukraine’s president. So what kind of damage can using national security resources for political purposes cause and how often does this kind of thing happen?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
The heart of the whistleblower’s allegation is that Trump officials took a document of middling classification level and stashed it in a computer system designed to protect some of the country’s most sensitive secrets.
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When most people think of abuses of classified information, they tend to think of just one kind—sharing too much with too many people. But David Rothkopf, a former staffer in the Clinton National Security Council and Daily Beast contributor who’s written extensively about the history of the NSC, points out that abuse can go both ways. “One of the central tenets of protecting our national security is classifying information properly and handling it properly. When somebody chooses to mis-classify something as a way of hiding the wrongdoing of an individual, it’s bad. When they do it to hide the wrongdoing of an individual that puts U.S. national security at risk and threatens our democratic systems, it’s much, much worse.”
What’s the harm in treating information with undue protection? It corrodes respect for things that truly should be secret (or more secret, in this case). As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his opinion on the landmark Pentagon Papers case in 1971, “when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.”
Too easy: It’s an abuse made all too easy by the long-standing habit of excessive secrecy and overclassification—classifying information above the level it needs—in the national security bureaucracy. Former officials from the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the classification system in the executive branch, have called the practice of overclassification “rampant.”
The executive order that spells out how to classify information says specifically that documents can’t be classified to “prevent or delay the release of information” that doesn’t need to be classified or to hide embarrassments or conceal crimes. It also tried to reduce overclassification by stating that officials should be trained specifically in how to avoid it. Those admonitions are nice, but the penalties for under-classifying material are many and severe while the ones for overclassifying information are rare and obscure. In other words, you’re less likely to draw suspicion by being overzealous in protecting classified information, which creates a climate ripe for abuse.
Not that Trump has been particularly zealous about protecting classified information. Most recently, he tweeted out classified satellite imagery of Iran’s failed space launch with a picture showing an astonishing level of detail, allowing internet sleuths to identify the satellite that took it and when it would be over Iran. Trump also blurted out sensitive intelligence information about ISIS’ bombing plans to visiting Russian government officials—information that Israeli intelligence had reportedly found by hacking ISIS members.
Secrecy 101: Whether information is classified and at what level are determined by executive order depending on how likely its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause damage, serious damage, or exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security. Those three tests correspond to the three levels of classification that exist in the federal system: confidential, secret, and top secret, respectively.
Secrets within secrets: But just because you have a top secret clearance doesn’t mean you can see all the top secret information the government has. Information can be further restricted with the use of compartments. If “the vulnerability of, or threat to, specific information is exceptional,” according to current policy, that information can be compartmented to a special access program denoted by a code word. Under those circumstances, only a much more limited circle of people “read into” that program can access its information. Those rules are spelled out in an executive order, not law, meaning that the president once again has the authority to decide what information gets classified at which level.
The vault: The whistleblower’s memo describes the system used to store the document as residing in the NSC’s Directorate of Intelligence Programs. What does that office work on? According to a journal article from the CIA’s in-house journal, the directorate handles oversight functions for “findings [authorizing covert action programs], counterintelligence, major procurement projects, and the interagency intelligence budget; it has no responsibility for production, dissemination, or coordination of current intelligence.”
The specific computer system, the whistleblower claimed, stored information related to covert action programs—secret operations executed by the intelligence community “to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad.”
Code word: So what are some examples of code word information? The Stuxnet virus that the NSA used to disable Iran’s nuclear program was code word information given the nickname “Olympic Games.” Another example is “Timber Sycamore,” the nickname for the Obama administration’s code word classified program to arm Syrian rebels to take on the Assad regime.
Mismatch: The point of uploading a memorandum of the president’s conversation with a foreign leader into a system designed for code word information, according to the whistleblower, was “protecting politically sensitive—rather than national security sensitive—information.” So does the use of a computer designed to store code word-classified information show the attempt at a cover-up, as the complaint alleges, or were officials just being diligent about protection of classified information?
“It’s not necessarily overclassification,” Professor Kel McClanahan, who teaches national security law at American University, told The Daily Beast. The text of the whistleblower complaint, he pointed out, alleged that the memo was stored in the system for code word information, but there are no indications, at least as of yet, that the information was classified that highly.
That’s buttressed by a memorandum of the conversation released by the White House on Wednesday. The classification markings show that the highest level of classification in the document was secret, with a dissemination restriction that the information could not be shared with foreign nationals. Special access programs with code words are marked differently, with their classification program and a nickname for the code word marked at the top, which isn’t evident in the memo released by the White House.
Instead of formally overclassifying the document to a higher level, Trump administration officials just allegedly treated the memo as though it belonged in the same computer system reserved for information about highly sensitive operations like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the plan to hack Iran’s nuclear program, and other covert actions. The document got all the benefits of the memo being code word-classified information—restriction to a tight circle of officials—without officials having to classify it that way. It’s not something that just anyone can do. As The Washington Post reported on Thursday, the practice requires written approval from officials as senior as the national security adviser or the White House chief of staff.
Precedent: The whistleblower’s memo says it’s “not the first time” White House officials have done this with a record of Trump’s conversation with a foreign leader. While it may be the practice in the Trump White House, it’s not the norm, at least not in other administrations.
“The vast majority of declassified historic presidential telcons and memcons that I've seen have been initially classified at the Secret or Top Secret level to protect communications between the the president and his foreign counterpart,” Nate Jones told The Daily Beast. Jones directs the National Security Archive’s Freedom of Information Act program and has spent years researching classified documents like the memo released by the White House.
He said that the code word classification is generally used to protect intelligence sources and methods. “In normal times, it would be extremely surprising to see a president mention or share those in a conversation with a foreign leader. “
