Revealing government secrets: How far will Trump and Congress go?
House Republicans this week announced their “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.” This follows an executive order issued last month by President Donald Trump ordering the release of records about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The broad idea is to get the federal government to reveal all its information about these assassinations as well as topics like Jeffrey Epstein, the origins of Covid-19 and UAPs (formerly known as UFOs).
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Rather than speculate about whether Trump and Congress will follow through, I would like to focus on the question of how this disclosure process should work.
The first and arguably most important question is who exactly has the authority to order the declassification and publication. Ideally, the head of the congressional task force should be a credible and independent person trusted by the bureaucracy and by the national security establishment. That person should be able to declassify documents without requiring approval from the president. On first glance, the current arrangement does not seem to allow that.
The risk is that Trump would hoard the most sensitive information and disclose selectively, to manipulate the news cycle or to distract attention from other events. It also could give him more political weapons to use against what he calls the “deep
