The loss of the signal shows that Trump takes the federal secrets seriously only when he adapts to him

As for the Trump administration, there are government secrets and then there are government secrets.

Details requested by a federal court on a military flight of immigrants Did this land many days ago with the cameras who recorded his arrival? Sorry, judge, too secret to reveal, even now long after the fact.

Details on a next military strike against the American enemies disclosed by the best national security councilors of the President on a group text chat not guaranteed? Not classified, not a violation of national security and not a big problem.

What constitutes an official secret in this new era in Washington, it turns out, seems to depend on who is asking and who is saying. The juxtaposition of two cases involving sensitive information in the same week strengthens the way in which it can be the approach of the situational president to the secrecy of the government.

And it illustrates the considerable ability of Mr. Trump to bend political reality to his will without worrying about facts or consistency. After all, this is a president who made Canada and Europe to be enemies not allied, who rewrite history to say that Ukraine has started war with Russia And those who sent lawyers to court to argue that Elon Musk is not really responsible for the government’s efficiency department.

This has become so common that the disparity in what constitutes a secret took place without a great recognition of disparity. On the one hand, the Trump administration invoked the so -called privilege of state secrets to challenge a federal judge who tried to determine whether his deportation of immigrants without mood was legal. On the other hand, Mr. Trump swept away the extraordinary dissemination of a planned attack on the Houthi militants in a group chat that inadvertently included a journalist on the commercial platform signal.

“What is disconcerting is the affirmation that the waiting military operations are not so sensitive, while the facts of a widely reported deportation that have already occurred cannot be disclosed,” said Steven Aftergood, who has spent decades in government secrecy issues at the Federation of American scientists. “It is difficult to take secrecy seriously as a national security tool when manipulated, therefore obviously for selfish political purposes”.

In both cases, the information at the center of the problem is a TimesTamp. In the case of immigration, judge James E. Boasberg ordered the administration to tell him what time the plane that transported Venezuelani believed to be members of the band taken from the US ground, at what time he left us aerial space, at what time he landed and what time the migrants were officially transferred from the custody of the United States.

The judge wants these details to determine if the administration has illegally violated his order to change the plane. The administration said that the information is too sensitive to give it.

In the case of Signal’s chat, the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the colleagues of the group chat (and the journalist erroneously added) the precise time that war planes and US drones would have hit the Houthi a couple of hours before.

Presumably, such information may have been useful to those who were targeted if they had known. But the White House and Mr. Hegseth are essentially saying that this information was actually not so sensitive.

“We have always said that no materials classified on this messaging thread has been sent,” said Karoline Leavitt, press secretary of the White House during a briefing this week. “There were no places, no source or methods revealed and there were certainly no war plans discussed”.

He did not mention the estimates of the time. Instead, when it is pressed by them by the journalists, Mrs. Leavitt changed the subject and attacked the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, publisher in the head of the Atlantic, and Democrats for doing too much. Former president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has therefore attacked for the withdrawal of troops failed by Afghanistan.

The veterans of national security in both sides derived the thesis according to which the details that Mr. Hegseth provided on the imminent strike were not classified during the group chat that also included the vice -president JD Vance, the secretary of state Marco Rubio, the national security councilor Michael Waltz and others.

“There is absolutely no way that the information shared in that group chat was not classified at the highest levels,” said Oona Hathaway, a former Pentagon lawyer now at the Yale Law School. “I am frankly amazed by the fact that anyone who would have tried to suggest otherwise. This detailed information on an imminent military operation is precisely the type of information that is more careful.”

He added: “This is all the more absurd in the light of the affirmation of the government that the privilege of state secrets allows him to hold back the information from the district court on a plan of migrants who had already landed”.

While less sensational decappea of ​​secrecy generally triggered serious investigations that involve possible criminal responsibilities, Thursday the prosecutor Pam Bondi seemed to suggest that he had no intention of pursuing the matter.

Just last week, however, the deputy of Mrs. Bondi, Todd Blanche, announced that the Department of Justice was opening a criminal investigation into a loss at the New York Times on the Venezuelan Band Tren de Aragua. In his announcement, Blanche said that the leaked information was “inaccurate but still classified”. As false information could be classified, he did not explain.

Trump has always seen the violations of national security secrecy through the aim of those who are violating. He won the presidency for the first time in 2016, at least in part, extending his opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, for using a non -safe private server to send and -mail while he was in the office. He led the crowd in songs of “blocking” it and said that if he had been elected “nobody will be above the law” when it comes to endangering the secrets of the government.

But once he arrived in office, Trump has regularly ignored warnings on the protection of government information. Him Sensitive satellite images published by Iran Online. He kept Using an unpaid cell phone Even after being said that he was monitored by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Him snatch official documents And he threw them on the ground despite the laws they asked that they were kept, leaving the assistants to collect the pieces and record them together.

More memorably, of course, Mr. Trump took classified documents when he left the White House in January 2021, storing them in a shower, an office, a bedroom and a ballroom in his Mar-A-Lago hold and challenging a quote that asked him to return them. When the special consultant Jack Smith later incriminate it Since on its management of secrets and conspiring to hinder justice, Trump has derived the case as a partisan persecution.

When it was discovered that Mr. Biden also ranked the documents in his house in Delaware, however, Trump expressed indignation, even if Mr. Biden, unlike Trump, promptly reported the discovery, returned the documents and collaborated with investigators. “Trump was peanuts in comparison”, Mr. Trump said at some pointreferring to himself in the third person.

Also on Thursday, the team of Mr. Trump remained behind a defense of the Whataboutism, insisting on the fact that the dissemination of a military operation in advance on a signal chat was nothing more than democratic transgressions.

“If you want to talk about classified information, he talks about what was at Hillary Clinton’s house,” Mrs. Bondi told journalists. “Talk about the documents classified in the garage of Joe Biden, to whom Hunter Biden had access.”

In fact, the investigators determined, none of the e -mails that Mrs. Clinton sent to her private server had the headers who classified them as classified. Only after the fact that the officials concluded that 110 and -mail in 52 e -mail chains on 30,000 and -mail contained information classified at the time when they were sent or received.

This was sufficient to ask an FBI investigation which, although it did not involve criminal accusations, proved to be quite embarrassing to help cost the presidency to Mrs. Clinton. In the same way, an investigation of special consultant on Mr. Biden did not produce accusations but included the politically harmful characterization of the president as a “man well intended and elderly with a bad memory” and “reduced faculty in the advancement of age”.

While Mrs. Bondi did not seem quite troubled by the dissemination of the attack plans by the Trump team to even start an investigation, her department went to court this week to protect the secret of information that could compromise the Trump administration politically and legally.

The flight data for the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants would have helped to judge Boasberg to understand if the administration had ignored his order to turn the plane so that he could first determine if the expulsion was legal.

The Department of Mrs. Bondi refused to conform, supporting in a brief that the dissemination “would have represented a reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs”. As a danger would be once the flight was not clear, but the administration included a declaration by Mr. Rubio stating that “he eroded the credibility of the United States insurance” to other countries “that the information will be kept in trust”.

However, the government of El Salvador, who accepted the request of the Trump administration to accept and imprison Venezuelan migrants, was unlikely to try to keep the matter secret. In fact, he published a video of the arrival. Hiding the time of arrival did not seem concern.

In an example of a strangeness of Washington, the two cases were converted in a way on Thursday in which judge Boasberg, acting in a separate cause presented in response to the chat of the attack plan, ordered the Trump administration to preserve all the reporting messages from 11 to 15 March to comply with the law on federal registers.

“This administration is doing more to discredit the secrecy of national security than critics never did,” he said later. “There have always been abuse and excesses in the policy of official secrecy. But everyone accepted that there were also real secrets, including the details of the imminent military operations, the identities of intelligence sources and so on.”