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Elizabeth Neumann was a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush and Trump administrations, with a specific focus on counterterrorism. In her role, she frequently dealt with sensitive national security secrets.
With this in mind, something Neumann said on ABC News’ “This Week” yesterday caught my attention. Referring to the documents included in the federal indictment against Donald Trump, she explained:
“[T]his causes people to die. This is very serious. Top secret Special Access Programs, when they fall into the wrong hands, people die and the United States’ security is deeply compromised.”
Since the controversy began in earnest, there’s been some question about the seriousness of the documents the former president took to his glorified country club. Assorted Republican voices would occasionally make the case that when it comes to national security, there’s classified and then there’s classified. Maybe Trump’s materials were relatively benign?
Apparently not. As a PBS report summarized, “[I]n the indictment itself, 31 documents listed and the 31 counts of willful retention of documents. Of that, 10 were sensitive compartmented information, another eight Special Access Programs. These are the most sensitive documents the government has, highly classified programs that very few people in government have access to.”
The Washington Post added, “Some of the documents are so sensitive that the Justice Department redacted their markings when describing them in the indictment.”
Reading this, I was reminded of an element of this scandal that we discussed last summer.
In the immediate aftermath of the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Republicans reflexively defended the former president and condemned federal law enforcement, though in a rather literal sense, GOP officials had no idea what they were talking about: The party didn’t know what Trump took or why he refused to give the documents back. Republicans defended him because that’s what was expected of them, but they were largely in the dark at the time.
But a handful of GOP officials were quietly open to the possibility that Trump had gone too far. Politico ran this report last August:
In an interview, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), an Intelligence Committee member, said it was important for the panel to glean additional information and acknowledged that mishandling of sensitive classified information would be a serious violation. “I mean, if he had actual Special Access Programs — do you know how extraordinarily sensitive that is? That’s very, very sensitive. If that were actually at his residence, that would be a problem,” Stewart said. “But we just don’t know that. So let’s find out.”
Well, we’ve found out. The Utah Republican made those comments on the record, effectively setting a standard for the controversy: If Trump took Special Access Programs, “that would be a problem.”
But we now know the former president did exactly that.
Politico’s report also quoted Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, saying, “When you get to compartmentalized classified spaces, it gets more serious.”
I mention this because of the significance of the benchmarks these Republicans set. With the indictment in hand, we can look anew at the scandal — not by my standards, or the Justice Department’s standards, or Democrats’ standards — but by the GOP’s own standards.
Conservative, red-state Republicans drew a line. We now know the former president crossed that line. With this in mind, shouldn’t there now be a bipartisan consensus that Trump’s scandal has merit? Are GOP leaders prepared to honor their own party’s benchmarks about what constitutes “a problem”?
This post revises our related earlier coverage.