In the Trump era, the definition of an official secret depends on what best suits the president.
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President Trump has long viewed national security violations through the lens of who exactly is committing the violations.
When it comes to the Trump administration, there are state secrets and there are state secrets.
The details a federal court is asking about a military immigrant flight that landed days ago, with video cameras recording its arrival? Sorry, Judge, too sensitive to reveal, even now, long after the fact.
Details of an impending military strike against America's enemies, leaked by the president's top national security advisers in an unsecured group text chat? Not classified, not a national security breach, and not a big deal.
What constitutes an official secret in this new era of Washington, it turns out, depends on who’s asking and who’s telling. The juxtaposition of two classified cases in the same week underscores how ad hoc President Trump’s approach to government secrecy can be.
And it illustrates Mr. Trump’s remarkable ability to bend political reality to his will, without worrying about facts or consistency. This is, after all, a president who has cast Canada and Europe as enemies rather than allies, who has rewritten history to claim that Ukraine started a war with Russia, and who has sent lawyers to court to prove that Elon Musk is not actually in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency.
It has become so pervasive that the discrepancy over what constitutes a secret has played out without much acknowledgement of the discrepancy. On one hand, the Trump administration has invoked the so-called state secrets privilege to challenge a federal judge trying to determine whether its deportation of immigrants without hearings or due process was legal. On the other, Mr. Trump has brushed off the stunning revelation of a planned attack on Houthi militants in a group chat that unwittingly involved a journalist on the commercial platform Signal.
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