Not Even the President Can Declassify Nuclear Secrets

[Flash]

Not Even the President Can Declassify Nuclear Secrets



The executive branch’s system of classification is among the weirdest aspects of the American government, and sometimes it seems as if those best equipped to understand it are people with a background in obscure religious practices—say, Roman Catholic sacramental theology—rather than journalists or lawyers. Certain officials are consecrated as having “original classification authority” (they can baptize documents as classified without reference to previous classification); some are ordained to classify but derive their authority from others. You can be defrocked for various reasons. But the authority to classify and declassify flows from one person with near-absolute power, and for four years that papal figure was Donald J. Trump. This awesome former power will protect him from prosecution, but only so much.


Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed yesterday that the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago concerned the existence of classified material at Trump’s Florida golf resort. And The Washington Post reported that the material included “documents relating to nuclear weapons,” which would seem to surpass in gravity the pilfering of presidential memorabilia that many speculated was the reason for the raid. If Trump took away a postcard from Kim Jong Un, well, tsk-tsk. Political prudence might dictate that Garland not prosecute the case.


Moreover, so much material is classified that one should expect a slipup here and there. For decades, the crusade against overclassification has been a cause mostly of the left, in part on the grounds that so much is secret that no one, let alone Trump, could be expected to abide by all classification rules. Secrets are not rare. By some measures there might be more information that is classified by the U.S. government than is unclassified, in any library, anywhere. In 2004, the physicist Peter Galison tallied the amount of classified material produced every year and found that “about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.” The government certainly has more classified data than exists unclassified in the entire Library of Congress. Mistakes will be made, especially by officials who are flagrantly heedless of basic procedure.


But fan letters and snapshots are one matter, and launch codes are another—and here the details of classification might decide just how much trouble Trump is in. First, let’s focus on the absolute portion of near-absolute power. The 1988 Supreme Court case Navy v. Egan confirmed that classification authority flows from the president except in specific instances separated from his powers by law. And here is where things get theological: A president can make most documents classified or declassified simply by willing them so. This peculiar power is so great that the government has an office that exists solely to manage it: the Information Security Oversight Office, which has a strong claim to being the coolest government office you’ve never heard of. (The longest-serving director of this office, Steven Garfinkel, told me that for two decades he had access to pretty much every secret in the executive branch. “If there was a version of the game show Jeopardy entirely about the federal government,” he deadpanned to me once, “I would be in the Tournament of Champions every single year.” Garfinkel retired to teach high school in 2002 and died in 2018.

His successor, J. William Leonard, led the office under George W. Bush, and he confirmed the lack of general limitation of his boss’s power. While a president is president, Leonard told me, “the rules and procedures governing the classification and declassification of information apply to everyone else.” And that means Trump could have declassified whatever he wished (again, with specific limitations soon to be discussed) before carting it off to Mar-a-Lago. He would not have had to file paperwork—just “utter the magic words,” Leonard told me. He could have waved his hand over the U-Haul trailer as it headed out the White House driveway and down I-95 toward Florida, and there would have been no classified material in there to mishandle.

Leonard noted important caveats, however. First, Trump’s power to declassify ended with his presidency. Second, that U-Haul could be reclassified by someone else. (Depending on traffic and the sharpness of the Biden administration, I would imagine it could have been reclassified somewhere around Fredericksburg, Virginia.) And third, there are certain materials that presidents cannot classify and declassify at will. One such category of material is the identity of spies.


Another is nuclear secrets. The Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954 produced an even stranger category of classified knowledge. Anything related to the production or use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power is inherently classified, and Trump could utter whatever words he pleased yet still be in possession of classified material. Where are our nuclear warheads? What tricks have we developed to make sure they work? This information is “born secret” no matter who produces it. The restrictions on documents of this type are incredibly tight. In the unlikely event that Trump came up with a new way to enrich uranium, and scribbled it on a cocktail napkin poolside at Mar-a-Lago early this year, that napkin would instantly have become a classified document subject to various controls and procedures, and possibly illegal for the former president to possess. Of course if he did so, no prosecutor would pursue him. A certain amount of leeway is crucial to the system.


If Trump was keeping nuclear secrets in the storeroom of his country club, without even the benefit of a padlock, and resisted attempts to secure those secrets against infiltrators and spies, a prosecutor might reasonably take more interest. After all, he’s the ex-president, not the pope.



Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...uments/671119/

[Grokmaster]

WHAT WAS IT WHEN OBAMA GAVE AMERICAN YELLOWCAKE URANIUM (NUCLEAR WEAPONS FUEL ) TO RUSSIA, FOLLOWED BY ILLEGAL EXPORTS OF IT OFFSHORE, THAT WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT WENT? ?


DON'T YOU EVEN FUCKING DARE TO TRY TO PRETEND IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, EITHER.

[floridafan]

WHAT WAS IT WHEN OBAMA GAVE AMERICAN YELLOWCAKE URANIUM (NUCLEAR WEAPONS FUEL ) TO RUSSIA, FOLLOWED BY ILLEGAL EXPORTS OF IT OFFSHORE, THAT WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT WENT? ?


DON'T YOU EVEN FUCKING DARE TO TRY TO PRETEND IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, EITHER.

Ah, that never happened, total bullshit, my dear.

[Flash]

Was that a nuclear secret?

[Grokmaster]

Ah, that never happened, total bullshit, my dear.

YOU FUCKING IGNORAMUS. DO YOU EVER KNOW THE FACTS ABOUT ANYTHING??


ILLEGAL EXPORTS< WITH NO LICENSE, AND WITHOUT NOTIFYING CONGRESS, AND THE OBAMIDIOTS HAD NO CLUE WHERE IT WENT, OTHER THAN "EUROPE"....



Uranium One deal led to some exports to Europe, memos show




After the Obama administration approved the sale of a Canadian mining company with significant U.S. uranium reserves to a firm owned by Russia’s government, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assured Congress and the public the new owners couldn’t export any raw nuclear fuel from America’s shores.



“No uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release that announced that ARMZ, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned Rosatom, had been approved to take ownership of the Uranium One mining firm and its American assets.

A year later, the nuclear regulator repeated the assurance in a letter to Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican in whose state Uranium One operated mines.


}“Neither Uranium One Inc. nor AMRZ holds a specific NRC export license. In order to export uranium from the United States, Uranium One Inc. or ARMZ would need to apply for and obtain a specific NRC license authorizing the exports of uranium for use in reactor fuel,” then-NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko wrote to Barrasso.

The NRC never issued an export license to the Russian firm, a fact so engrained in the narrative of the Uranium One controversy that it showed up in The Washington Post’s official fact-checker site this week. “We have noted repeatedly that extracted uranium could not be exported by Russia without a license, which Rosatom does not have,” the Post reported on Monday, linking to the 2011 Barrasso letter.



Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.


NRC officials said they could not disclose the total amount of uranium that Uranium One exported because the information is proprietary. They did, however, say that the shipments only lasted from 2012 to 2014 and that they are unaware of any exports since then.







https://thehill.com/policy/national-...pe-memos-show/



DIDN'T HAPPEN, HUH DUMBFUCK?

[floridafan]

YOU FUCKING IGNORAMUS. DO YOU EVER KNOW THE FACTS ABOUT ANYTHING??


ILLEGAL EXPORTS< WITH NO LICENSE, AND WITHOUT NOTIFYING CONGRESS, AND THE OBAMIDIOTS HAD NO CLUE WHERE IT WENT, OTHER THAN "EUROPE"....



Uranium One deal led to some exports to Europe, memos show




After the Obama administration approved the sale of a Canadian mining company with significant U.S. uranium reserves to a firm owned by Russia’s government, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assured Congress and the public the new owners couldn’t export any raw nuclear fuel from America’s shores.



“No uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release that announced that ARMZ, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned Rosatom, had been approved to take ownership of the Uranium One mining firm and its American assets.

A year later, the nuclear regulator repeated the assurance in a letter to Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican in whose state Uranium One operated mines.


}“Neither Uranium One Inc. nor AMRZ holds a specific NRC export license. In order to export uranium from the United States, Uranium One Inc. or ARMZ would need to apply for and obtain a specific NRC license authorizing the exports of uranium for use in reactor fuel,” then-NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko wrote to Barrasso.

The NRC never issued an export license to the Russian firm, a fact so engrained in the narrative of the Uranium One controversy that it showed up in The Washington Post’s official fact-checker site this week. “We have noted repeatedly that extracted uranium could not be exported by Russia without a license, which Rosatom does not have,” the Post reported on Monday, linking to the 2011 Barrasso letter.



Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.


NRC officials said they could not disclose the total amount of uranium that Uranium One exported because the information is proprietary. They did, however, say that the shipments only lasted from 2012 to 2014 and that they are unaware of any exports since then.







https://thehill.com/policy/national-...pe-memos-show/



DIDN'T HAPPEN, HUH DUMBFUCK?

It was the NRC you fucking dumb shit:

Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.

[Grokmaster]

It was the NRC you fucking dumb shit:

Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.

YOU FUCKING IDIOT. THE NRC IS WHO REVEALED THE EXPORTS, ALLOWED BY THE OBAMA ADM. VIA THE RUSSIAN OWNED COMPANY THEY QAGREED TO LET TAKEOVER A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF US URANIUM.

THE NRC IS THE "NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION", WHO CLEARLY COVERED OBAMA'S ASS , BY NOT REPORTING THE EXPORTS TO CONGRESS.

YOU ARE AN IMBECILE.

[Hawkeye10]

YOU FUCKING IDIOT. THE NRC IS WHO REVEALED THE EXPORTS, ALLOWED BY THE OBAMA ADM. VIA THE RUSSIAN OWNED COMPANY THEY QAGREED TO LET TAKEOVER A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF US URANIUM.

YOU ARE AN IMBECILE.

A liar and a Cunt for sure ....the stupid is just a maybe.

[BartenderElite]

All the right does now is whataboutism. That's it.

The desperation is palpable.

[Guno צְבִי]

WHAT WAS IT WHEN OBAMA GAVE AMERICAN YELLOWCAKE URANIUM (NUCLEAR WEAPONS FUEL ) TO RUSSIA, FOLLOWED BY ILLEGAL EXPORTS OF IT OFFSHORE, THAT WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT WENT? ?


DON'T YOU EVEN FUCKING DARE TO TRY TO PRETEND IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, EITHER.

Does a little Cuckoo fly into your ear and tell you that

[Geeko Sportivo]

WHAT WAS IT WHEN OBAMA GAVE AMERICAN YELLOWCAKE URANIUM (NUCLEAR WEAPONS FUEL ) TO RUSSIA, FOLLOWED BY ILLEGAL EXPORTS OF IT OFFSHORE, THAT WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT WENT? ?


DON'T YOU EVEN FUCKING DARE TO TRY TO PRETEND IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, EITHER.

Listen up you fucking retard.

The United States and Russia have been trading uranium for years, but you have it back-ass-wards as usual.

Russia was disassembling their Nuclear Warheads by treaty, and trading the enriched Uranium from them to us in exchange for raw Uranium we were providing them.

RUSSIA and the US only use uranium in our Nuclear Power plants anymore.

Russia and the US do not even use Uranium for NUKES ANYMORE!

GO GET YOU A FUCKING BRAIN AND LEARN WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN THE WORLD YOU IGNORANT BASTARD.

[Matt Dillon]

Not Even the President Can Declassify Nuclear Secrets



The executive branch’s system of classification is among the weirdest aspects of the American government, and sometimes it seems as if those best equipped to understand it are people with a background in obscure religious practices—say, Roman Catholic sacramental theology—rather than journalists or lawyers. Certain officials are consecrated as having “original classification authority” (they can baptize documents as classified without reference to previous classification); some are ordained to classify but derive their authority from others. You can be defrocked for various reasons. But the authority to classify and declassify flows from one person with near-absolute power, and for four years that papal figure was Donald J. Trump. This awesome former power will protect him from prosecution, but only so much.


Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed yesterday that the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago concerned the existence of classified material at Trump’s Florida golf resort. And The Washington Post reported that the material included “documents relating to nuclear weapons,” which would seem to surpass in gravity the pilfering of presidential memorabilia that many speculated was the reason for the raid. If Trump took away a postcard from Kim Jong Un, well, tsk-tsk. Political prudence might dictate that Garland not prosecute the case.


Moreover, so much material is classified that one should expect a slipup here and there. For decades, the crusade against overclassification has been a cause mostly of the left, in part on the grounds that so much is secret that no one, let alone Trump, could be expected to abide by all classification rules. Secrets are not rare. By some measures there might be more information that is classified by the U.S. government than is unclassified, in any library, anywhere. In 2004, the physicist Peter Galison tallied the amount of classified material produced every year and found that “about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.” The government certainly has more classified data than exists unclassified in the entire Library of Congress. Mistakes will be made, especially by officials who are flagrantly heedless of basic procedure.


But fan letters and snapshots are one matter, and launch codes are another—and here the details of classification might decide just how much trouble Trump is in. First, let’s focus on the absolute portion of near-absolute power. The 1988 Supreme Court case Navy v. Egan confirmed that classification authority flows from the president except in specific instances separated from his powers by law. And here is where things get theological: A president can make most documents classified or declassified simply by willing them so. This peculiar power is so great that the government has an office that exists solely to manage it: the Information Security Oversight Office, which has a strong claim to being the coolest government office you’ve never heard of. (The longest-serving director of this office, Steven Garfinkel, told me that for two decades he had access to pretty much every secret in the executive branch. “If there was a version of the game show Jeopardy entirely about the federal government,” he deadpanned to me once, “I would be in the Tournament of Champions every single year.” Garfinkel retired to teach high school in 2002 and died in 2018.

His successor, J. William Leonard, led the office under George W. Bush, and he confirmed the lack of general limitation of his boss’s power. While a president is president, Leonard told me, “the rules and procedures governing the classification and declassification of information apply to everyone else.” And that means Trump could have declassified whatever he wished (again, with specific limitations soon to be discussed) before carting it off to Mar-a-Lago. He would not have had to file paperwork—just “utter the magic words,” Leonard told me. He could have waved his hand over the U-Haul trailer as it headed out the White House driveway and down I-95 toward Florida, and there would have been no classified material in there to mishandle.

Leonard noted important caveats, however. First, Trump’s power to declassify ended with his presidency. Second, that U-Haul could be reclassified by someone else. (Depending on traffic and the sharpness of the Biden administration, I would imagine it could have been reclassified somewhere around Fredericksburg, Virginia.) And third, there are certain materials that presidents cannot classify and declassify at will. One such category of material is the identity of spies.


Another is nuclear secrets. The Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954 produced an even stranger category of classified knowledge. Anything related to the production or use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power is inherently classified, and Trump could utter whatever words he pleased yet still be in possession of classified material. Where are our nuclear warheads? What tricks have we developed to make sure they work? This information is “born secret” no matter who produces it. The restrictions on documents of this type are incredibly tight. In the unlikely event that Trump came up with a new way to enrich uranium, and scribbled it on a cocktail napkin poolside at Mar-a-Lago early this year, that napkin would instantly have become a classified document subject to various controls and procedures, and possibly illegal for the former president to possess. Of course if he did so, no prosecutor would pursue him. A certain amount of leeway is crucial to the system.


If Trump was keeping nuclear secrets in the storeroom of his country club, without even the benefit of a padlock, and resisted attempts to secure those secrets against infiltrators and spies, a prosecutor might reasonably take more interest. After all, he’s the ex-president, not the pope.



Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...uments/671119/

Nice try, commie faggot.

[Flash]

Nice try, commie faggot.

Is there an error in the story? What is not true?

It is not hard to check--you should try it sometime.

[Matt Dillon]

Is there an error in the story? What is not true?

It is not hard to check--you should try it sometime.

You should try not being a traitorous fucktard with TDS sometime. It just might enlighten you.

[Flash]

You should try not being a traitorous fucktard with TDS sometime. It just might enlighten you.

A person is a traitor because they do not believe Trump's lies?

Are you claiming a president can declassify nuclear secrets?