I have been wanting to do this diary for a long time. Since it is not a current events or BREAKING NEWS kind of diary, I’m sure it will generate few recs. and fall off the recent posts list rather quickly. Still, I hope some will find it thought provoking as is my intent.
Before I get to the thought provoking part, it is necessary to take a look back at the Trump Administration. Yes, I know even the thought at looking back at that train wreck of a Presidency makes us nauseous. But sometimes one has to look back at past tragedies to prevent future ones. So grab your Dramamine and let’s get to it.
The first question I will explore is two fold:
Did staff withhold gathered intelligence from Trump?
and
Did staff sometimes fail to carry out Trump’s Orders?
With regard to part one of the question, we have to think back to the first few months of the Trump Presidency. Remember when Trump met with the Russian Ambassador and disclosed (purposefully or inadvertently, you decide) highly classified intelligence to him. He later claimed that he declassified it on the spot and that it was within his power as President. It was reported at the time that members of the Intelligence Community were shocked and panicked. They described the result in two ways, at best we had lost a crucial intelligence source or sources, and at worst it got these sources killed.
As I see it, after that incident, the responsible career staff within the Intelligence Community had two real choices:
1. Continue to give all the intelligence gathered to Trump and let the chips fall where they may; or
2. Cherry pick the intelligence they gave Trump so if he divulged it, it couldn’t do substantial damage to National Security.
Which one do you think they chose?
While I can offer no real proof as to which one they chose, other than the apparent lack of intelligence disclosures after that initial event, #2 seems more likely to me. The only other explanation is that they continued to feed Trump all the gathered intelligence and Trump practiced self restraint in his meetings with Putin and other Russians. Not likely!
Moving onto part two of the above question, did staff sometimes disobey/ignore a Trump order?
I’m not talking about orders which were beyond Presidential authority and where staff informed Trump that they were unconstitutional and therefore could not be carried out. Although, I suspect that happened numerous times. I’m talking about orders that were clearly within Trump’s Presidential authority. I can only come up with one “possible” example of a Trump order being ignored, but I won’t rule out others. I say “possible” because there are conflicting accounts of this event.
This is a more recent event that occurred in the run up to Jan. 6. It was those famous White House meetings in which Trump was trying to get the Acting AG Jeff Rosen to say DoJ was investigating election fraud and when the AG refused, Trump tried to replace him with the low on the totem pole, Assistant AG Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to make the announcement Trump wanted. There are conflicting accounts of the last meeting where witnesses in sworn testimony to the Jan. 6 Committee said Trump ordered Clark to replace Rosen.
One account was that after pretty much the entire leadership team of the DoJ threatened to resign, Trump backed off and rescinded the Order.
However, another account was that Trump never expressly rescinded the order and that White House Counsel simply ignored it and did not take the necessary steps to execute the lawful verbal order.
Assuming the second account is true, which does not seem a stretch considering this is Trump we’re talking about, this would be an example of White House staff ignoring/disobeying a valid Presidential Order.
So where am I leading you to with all this? I am leading you to one fundamental question we all need to consider and reflect upon:
When, if ever, is it acceptable (Constitutional) for Un-elected Executive Staff to keep Intelligence secrets from a President or ignore (disobey) a President’s constitutional orders?
To try to answer this question we need to look at two opposite but equally bad situations.
In one situation, you could have an un-elected staff that is acting in the best interests of the country, against a President who is acting in his own interests or in the interests of a hostile foreign power. This is the Trump scenario. I know, if you’re thinking in the context of a President like Donald Trump, you’re probably saying staff should keep information from and disobey orders by such a rogue President as often as necessary to keep him from destroying the country.
However, in the opposite situation, you could have a rogue, un-elected staff that is corrupt and misleads a President into making decisions that are not in the best interests of the country. A somewhat poor example of this is where President G. W. Bush was mislead into the Iraq War by his VP and Staff (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.) who cherry picked or maybe even falsified the Intelligence they provided to him on Iraq WMD. Yes, Bush was not an innocent putts in the lead up to the war, but if he was presented with all the intelligence in a fair and unbiased manor, one cannot discount the possibility that Bush could have made a different decision with regard to Iraq.
What makes both of these situations bad is that they are both are crimes against the Constitution committed by un-elected staff, regardless of the fact that the first is being committed in the best interests of the country, while the second is being committed for nefarious purposes. So approaching this question from a strictly Constitutional perspective, the answer to the question above is that there should never be a situation where unelected staff should keep information from or disobey a lawful order by an elected President. I think most of us would agree that that should be the Rule. But like all rules, there are exceptions.
Such exceptions come from the realization that the Constitution (including its amendments) is not a perfect document. It is not perfect because logically any document written by humans who are inherently not perfect, has to be imperfect. I think the Founding Fathers who wrote the original Constitution realized this when they started the Constitution with the somewhat awkward phrase:
”In order to form a more perfect union...”
Notice they did not say in order to form a perfect union. They knew from the start that while perfection is a goal to be strived for, no matter how good the written Constitution was, it would not be perfect. As such, it could not address all possible future political situations.
So while we should all agree that crimes that violate the Constitution are, for lack of a better word, wrong, there are times in our history where such crimes are necessary to preserve the greater good (i.e., sometimes it’s necessary to let the ends justify the means).
Finally, getting back to the Trump administration to wrap things up, one would have to say that it is more likely than not that responsible un-elected Executive staff violated the Constitution in withholding intelligence from President Trump and/or ignoring (disobeying) his lawful orders. Yes, they committed a Constitutional crime in doing so, but looking at the possible apocalyptic outcomes if they didn’t, I think we would all agree that it was a crime that should go unpunished.