Friday Round Up! 10/6/23

The former president blabbed nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago. No biggie.

Trump’s civil fraud trial got underway this week — but that wasn’t even the biggest story. We learned on Thursday that Trump reportedly told an Australian billionaire who frequented his club, Anthony Pratt, sensitive (and I assume, highly classified) information regarding our nuclear arsenal:

According to Pratt's account, as described by the sources, Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, to which an excited Trump -- ‘leaning’ toward Pratt as if to be discreet -- then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.

It gets worse. Pratt then turned around and told no fewer than 45 other people this information, “including six journalists, 11 of his company's employees, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers.” Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

This information is apparently on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s radar, though it wasn’t included in the facts of his indictment. You might wonder why this kind of disclosure wouldn’t constitute a separate crime (this type of conduct would be covered by 18 U.S.C. 793(d) and (e)), but it’s likely because the high standard of proof in what would ultimately become a he-said-he-said issue would just be complicated and muddy the waters. Smith’s case right now, which relies on Trump’s willful retention of classified information, and his deliberate attempts to evade and obstruct attempts to recover them, is much tighter and more straightforward.

But as I have said repeatedly over the last six years, just because something can’t or won’t be prosecuted criminally doesn’t mean that it is not a major national security threat. Let’s not forget that in his first meeting with Russian officials in the Oval Office — in which American journalists were not permitted — Trump shared highly classified code-word intelligence. After that, Trump met with Putin at least five times while president with no other American officials present, and there is no record of their conversations. We may never know the full extent to which Trump has compromised our nation’s secrets, and it is utterly mind-boggling that a third of the country is willing to put him back in charge of them.

Trump’s loose lips are relevant to the podcast discussion that Renato and I had this week about the financial losses coming Trump’s way as a result of the civil fraud case brought by the New York Attorney General. The only thing worse than Trump being privy to national secrets again is a broke Trump being privy to national secrets again. What could go wrong?

My articles this week:

• I wrote this piece for CAFE Insider about Hunter Biden’s lawsuits against the various people who have been disseminating the contents of his laptop, and why they matter. One implication of the crazy conspiracy theories spawned — like the claim that the government was in cahoots with tech companies to “censor” speech before the 2020 election, which I delved into in this Substack post — is that they are being used to block government efforts to slow the spread of disinformation, as the kooky Fifth Circuit did in this ruling last week.

Podcasts worth listening to:

• Speaking of the kooky Fifth Circuit and its rulings, I strongly recommend giving a listen to this week’s CAFE Insider podcast with Joyce Vance and Preet Bharara and guest Dahlia Lithwick, who all do a really excellent job of laying out what is at stake in the coming SCOTUS term (spoiler: basically the entire administrative state). As Lithwick notes in the podcast, it’s important to understand the thru-line between the substance of those cases and the pay-to-play scandals that have been revealed about Justices Thomas and Alito. This podcast will also be great context for our discussion with Steve Vladeck in a couple of weeks (see below), who will explain how this ideological agenda is also being furthered by the moves the Court is making, or not making, behind the scenes. (Prepare to be angry!)

• I am also loving this new podcast with Julia Ioffe, “About a Boy: The Story of Vladimir Putin.” It has so much excellent background information about how the post-war Soviet Union shaped the personality and thinking of one of the most dangerous men in the world today.

Upcoming events:

• Freedom Academy Book Club discussion with Steve Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, Tuesday, October 17, 3 p.m. EDT. Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at noon, and a recording of the discussion will be posting the following day. (Please check out the new Freedom Academy Book Club tab, where I will collate our book club discussions!). Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at noon.

• DATE/TIME TBA: Class guest speaker Colin Clarke, Director of Research for The Soufan Group. I thought of Colin as I was writing my last post on Yevgeny Prigozhin, as he has followed and written about Prigozhin’s The Wagner Group over the last several years. He will offer some great insight connecting what we are covering in class with the war in Ukraine and Russia’s global operations.