How Mar-a-Lago docs fiasco could put military and intel lives at risk: ex-CIA chief of staff

26 June 2023

Claiming that special counsel Jack Smith's 37-count criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is politically motivated, the former president's defenders in right-wing media often resort to "whataboutism" — as in, "What about the government documents found in the homes of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence?" Or "What about Hillary Clinton's e-mails in 2016?" But Trump's critics typically respond that Biden, Clinton and Pence, unlike Trump, have been totally cooperative with federal investigators.

Trump defenders also downplay the nature of the highly classified documents that Trump, according to Smith's team, was allegedly storing at Mar-a-Lago — claiming that the national security matters in question are overblown. But former CIA Chief of Staff Larry Pfeiffer, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on June 26, lays out some reasons why it was so dangerous for "top secret" documents to be moved to Mar-a-Lago.

"The classifieds documents that Donald Trump is charged with mishandling were marked 'SECRET' or 'TOP SECRET,' the highest classification we afford our nation's secrets," the former CIA chief of staff explains. "By definition, the uncontrolled release of that information could be expected to cause 'serious' or 'exceptionally grave' damage, respectively, to our national security. As bad as that sounds, it gets worse: According to the indictment against Trump, eight of the TOP SECRET documents may have had information about or derived from so-called Special Access Programs (SAPs)."

SAPs, according to Pfeiffer, are "so sensitive they require enhanced safeguards and the strictest access requirements."

"The sensitivity of these documents was so great that prosecutors were obliged to redact even the codewords on the documents," Pfeiffer notes. "The implication is that even publicly acknowledging the codenames of these projects, without discussing their operations at all, was deemed a great security risk. These included documents about the nuclear capabilities of another country, military attacks by a foreign country, the military capabilities of a foreign country, the timeline and details of an attack in a foreign country, the regional military activity of a foreign country, the military activity of foreign countries and the United States, and military activity in a foreign country."

Pfeiffer adds, "And as sensitive as the subjects of those documents are, what was really put at risk by our former commander-in-chief were the nation's most sensitive activities and information derived from them."

Pfeiffer cites "state-of-the-art weapons systems and platforms" as an example of the type of information that SAPs can "protect."

"This information is so highly safeguarded because it can describe not only what our most advanced technologies can do, but also, potentially what they can't do," Pfeiffer points out. "The risks to national security, if America's adversaries and enemies were to learn how to evade reconnaissance satellites, find our nuclear submarines in the ocean depths, or shoot our planes out of the sky, would be immense."

Read Larry Pfeiffer's full article for The Bulwark at this link.

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