If you thought Donald Trump’s obsession with personal loyalty and secrecy was just about FBI directors and payoffs to porn stars, think again. Trump’s unprecedented use of non-disclosure agreements for White House staff extends all the way down to interns, Asawin Suebsaeng reports.
Interns aren’t just warned about leaking; they’re faced with someone from the White House counsel’s office “warning them that a breach of the NDA—blabbing to the media, for instance—could result in legal, and thus financial, consequences for them.” Since senior White House staffers have been told to sign NDAs with $10 million penalties for violations, this threat to interns is potentially terrifying. The Trump White House labels these threats as “ethics training,” despite Trump’s own wholesale rejection of the very notion of ethics.
As one former Obama administration official put it, while working in the White House requires discretion at all times, “this White House’s approach to non-disclosure agreements, even for interns, seems to suggest that guarding against criticism of the president and his family—what most of us would consider to be protected speech—is just as important as safeguarding the sensitive information the American public entrusts to the government.”
The good news is that White House NDAs are likely unenforceable. In fact, one ethics expert says, Trump officials could face serious penalties for trying to prevent any employee from talking to Congress about what they witnessed in the White House. But even an unenforceable intimidation tactic can work to intimidate, particularly when wielded against vulnerable interns. That’s the Trump way, though: bully, intimidate, and lie about your leverage over people. And since the other Trump way is to hire only multimillionaires and billionaires, $10 million may not sound like that much of a threat to these interns anyway.