If you never read anything else from me, please read this.

Attorney General Garland is wrong, and he likely knows it, but he’s hoping that you don’t have the background and experience to call him out. Well, I do, and I am.

My career in the national security establishment spans 40 years, beginning as a Marine Corps private in 1976, reaching an apogee as a non-career Senior Executive Service appointee at the Pentagon in the Bush administration, and ending in 2016 as an independent consultant. During the vast majority of that time, I held top level clearances, including long stretches where I had multiple code word and special access program clearances. I’ve also had academic training on the national security classification system. In the late 1990s, I got a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from the Joint Military Intelligence College, which included coursework on national security classification system. I don’t claim to be the most qualified, but there should be little doubt that I am qualified to speak on this subject.

It’s easy to understand why we have a classification system: There are certain things we don’t want our enemies to find out. But we also don’t want to live in a police state where powerful individuals arbitrarily declare certain information secret and punish anyone who reveals it. If you doubt that American bureaucrats hide their wrongdoing, spend five minutes researching what was revealed by the Church and Pike Committees of the 1970s. You’ll find such treasures as COINTELPRO, MK-ULTRA, and the rest of the “Family Jewels.” Thus, we need a system that protects sensitive information while simultaneously preventing bad government actors from covering up malfeasance.?

The national security classification system exists under the authority of the president in his constitutional role as commander in chief. The key thing to understand is that the president has unlimited authority to declassify information. No bureaucrat can second guess the president’s decision in this regard. Full stop. End of discussion.?

I might not like it when the president reveals sensitive missile and warhead details during strategic negotiations, but the president has that authority. If you’re wondering why I mentioned those things, it’s because they happened when a Democrat was in the White House. The same talking heads that rant about Orange Man Bad now were notably silent about nuclear secrets then.

Why does the president have declassification authority? Because the president is the only elected official who is answerable to the entire American public. His authority to declassify is what protects us from abuse by the bureaucracy.

But, you say, the modern bureaucracy would never use classification to hide its own misdeeds!?

I beg to differ, and I’ve got receipts. In the late 1990s I was Legislative Director for Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He was the head of a special Judiciary subcommittee called Department of Justice Oversight, or DOJO. The subcommittee was tasked with conducting oversight on the FBI’s handling of the Wen Ho Lee and Peter Lee espionage cases. I served as lead investigator and drafted the reports for that subcommittee. The DOJ/FBI fought tooth and nail to keep a lid on anything that made them look bad, and they were more than willing to misuse the classification system to achieve that end.?

?Nobody wanted to put dangerous information into the public domain, but DOJ was relentless, constantly making specious classification claims to prevent the subcommittee from releasing its final report. Senator Specter even considered reading the report into the congressional record, relying on the speech and debate clause to protect himself from potential espionage charges.?

Everything finally came to a head during one last session to understand their objections, and to reword or remove anything they could demonstrate was genuinely classified. To keep things simple, I had recommended sending a copy of the final report without end notes. (My reasons for doing so will become obvious momentarily.) After the DOJ/FBI/Navy team completed their classification review, they came to the Senate Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility to discuss their redactions and objections. They were objecting to things that were clearly not classified and it became obvious they were not acting in good faith.?

Then they made the mistake that turned the tide. They objected to a specific phrase. I don’t recall exactly what it was—it’s been more than twenty years—but the important point is that the information they were calling classified had come directly from a White House press release. Moreover, the exact phrase they were calling classified had been underlined for emphasis in that press release. They knew they were caught. They backed off and the report was eventually released. It’s now available in the Congressional Record, in virtually identical form to what we submitted for classification review. That episode proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the bureaucracy was up to no good.

?As further proof of that, consider the Peter Lee case. DOJ’s refusal to prosecute Peter Lee was one of the main reasons the DOJO subcommittee was established. During most of the oversight process, DOJ and the Navy maintained that what Peter Lee revealed wasn’t really classified. Anyone could see that wasn’t true. The government had spent tens of millions of dollars to develop a very sensitive capability. Peter Lee gave a lecture in China and showed them exactly where to filter a certain set of data to replicate the very capability we’d spent millions developing. Moreover, in doing so, he made certain strategic assets vulnerable. Clearly, this was classified, and it didn’t make sense that the Navy and DOJ weren’t willing to prosecute.

When pressed, the Navy‘s argument was that the information wasn’t really classified, so we should just drop the whole thing. We knew better and asked the Navy rep to testify in an open hearing by reading exactly what Peter Lee had said. Not surprisingly, the officer didn’t want to, and was forced to admit that the revelation was classified, but suggested that it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie. That’s not the end of that story, but it’s the end of that story for now.

?The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I ended up leaving the Hill not long thereafter, in part because I felt the place had become too partisan. Yes, I realize it’s much worse now, but I knew deep in my heart that I was not the bad guy. I also knew the FBI knew I wasn’t the bad guy. How do I know that? Because three months later, just a couple of weeks after 9/11, they hired me to do classified Arabic language work. You can imagine the shocked looks on the faces of some of the people I’d been conducting oversight on when I was given an unescorted badge to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I already had a full-time day job for a major defense contractor, but I spent the next two years working nights and weekends for the FBI doing the classified work on national security issues.

In an ironic twist of fate, I wrote a thesis on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction for a master’s degree at the Joint Military Intelligence College. In May 2001, the Defense Intelligence Agency published my thesis, which showed that Iraq had largely dismantled its WMD programs, and suggested that the public wouldn’t support military action as a counter-proliferation measure. It’s mildly ironic that my work on Iraq’s WMD programs launched me into a non-career SES position at the Pentagon, working for Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. It’s slightly more ironic that I didn’t show up on his radar screen until well after the invasion. I was brought to his attention by a member of his military staff who knew me from our time together at the US Naval Academy and, later, Oxford University. The really ironic part is that without my previous classification fights with the DOJ/FBI, I’d have been obliterated by the Pentagon bureaucracy. Instead, I survived to tell this tale.

By the time I got to Iraq in early 2004, it was clear that they didn’t have large stores of WMD and I got re-purposed as the liaison between Ambassador Bremer’s staff and Lieutenant General Sanchez’s CJTF-7 staff on detainee issues. When I rotated back to the Pentagon later that year, I had no interest in further work on detainee issues, and I especially didn’t want to take the newly created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs, so I volunteered to work on what eventually became the Joint IED Task Force.

My relatively brief time as a political appointee at the Pentagon resulted in two additional demonstrations of how the bureaucracy misuses classification. The first is actually the rest of the story about the Navy program mentioned above. All I’ll say on that topic is that there was a major discrepancy between the claims they made to a congressional oversight committee and what they said to a political appointee they thought might be able to get funding added to their program.

The other, more significant, incident arose out of a congressional authorization that allowed the Secretary of Defense to reprogram up to $100 million from any budget line to the counter-IED effort. All the SecDef had to do was write a memo explaining why it was necessary. And it just so happened that the congressional sponsor of that provision had a program in mind that he thought wasn’t getting enough attention or funding. You may be shocked to learn, but bureaucrats in the Pentagon don’t like people taking money from their programs. They obviously couldn’t take on the SecDef or the Deputy Secretary, but the guy behind the paperwork was fair game. When the memo was prepared, signed and sent out, the bureaucrats saw an opportunity to take me out. They confiscated my hard drive and claimed I’d caused a classified spill.

What they didn’t know is that I’d been through this drill before, and I was ready to fight back. I asked for a meeting between the accusers and the senior classification authority of the Pentagon. I wanted them to bring the classification guide they alleged covered the information in question. When we got to the meeting, I asked them to explain the exact words they believed were classified, and to point to the section of the classification guide that covered it.?

That turned out to be a problem—for them, not for me—because I showed them exactly where I’d obtained the information they were objecting to. It was an email from Joe Votel. If that name rings a bell, it should. He was the head of the Army IED Task Force and later went on to command CENTCOM. He’s one of the hardest working men I’ve ever met, and he’s an outstanding individual. I can’t help but wonder how it would have turned out if the source of the information had been someone lower down the Army’s hierarchy. It might not have gone so well for me. In the end, they backed off, but that incident demonstrated—once again—that the bureaucracy is not above misusing classification for bureaucratic infighting.

So, if you’re wondering why the DOJ and the FBI can’t be trusted to play it straight on matters of classification, it’s really simple: institutions often conflate their own parochial interests with national security.?

If it turns out that the president was writing a book or wanted to use documents in his lawsuit and the DOJ/FBI seized the material to prevent him from doing so, then you will have absolute proof of their bad intentions.?

By way of full disclosure, I knocked on doors for the 2016 Trump campaign in Wisconsin. I applied for an appointed position at the Pentagon and was granted an interview, but was told that my experience there was too far in the past. Some lessons remain relevant even after time. Mistrust of government is one of those lessons.