Let me tell you something. When I read this story, I had to put my phone down and walk around the kitchen for a minute, because my blood pressure was doing things my doctor warned me about.
On July 8, President Trump was in Turkey for a NATO summit. He boarded Air Force One in front of the cameras. Then, according to the Washington Post, he climbed into an airport catering truck, got ferried to a completely different military plane on the other side of the aircraft, and flew out without telling a single reporter he was gone. The journalists, plus some White House staff, were left on the original plane. The shades were ordered down. The Secret Service told a photographer who cracked one open to shut it immediately.
They flew to the UK on what was essentially a decoy jet. The real president was on a C-32A using the call sign “Reach 18.” The decoy kept the “Air Force One” call sign so nobody would figure it out.
Marius Vassnes (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsNow. I have four kids. I have run a lot of shell games in my time, usually involving who ate the last Pop-Tart. But I have never once conducted an elaborate ruse and then told the people I left behind, “Oh by the way, you were probably in danger the whole time, but don’t worry about it.”
Because that is what Trump did. When reporters finally got to ask him about the closed shades, he said, and I am quoting directly here: “Because you’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleazebags we have to deal with.” Then he added, “If I go, you go, right?” And then, the cherry on top: “Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”
Excuse me? You secretly evacuated yourself off a plane you believed might be targeted by a missile, left the press corps on it, and then your parting gift is a stand-up comedy routine about how they might want to find new jobs? I have questions for the manager of this operation, and the manager is the federal government.
Here is where it gets worse, and I did not think it could. Two days after the New York Times reported on what happened, the Justice Department, through the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, subpoenaed the Times journalists. Not the leak. The journalists. The ones who found out the president sneaked out the back of a plane in a catering truck and wrote it down.
Pedro Aragão (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThe subpoenas were eventually withdrawn on July 23, in front of a judge who was, per the reporting, skeptical. Less than a week later, Senate Republicans confirmed Jay Clayton, the man whose office issued those subpoenas, as director of national intelligence.
I am going to let that sit there for a second.
So the sequence is: president does something secret and possibly dangerous for the people he left behind. Reporters find out. Reporters get subpoenaed. Subpoenas collapse under scrutiny. The guy who issued them gets promoted to run the intelligence community. And we are all supposed to just move along like this is normal Tuesday behavior.
Securities and Exchange Commission (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe Committee to Protect Journalists said the administration “has a responsibility to ensure that journalists covering the president are not unnecessarily exposed to danger.” Jose Zamora, their regional director, said reporters “should be informed of credible security threats so they can make informed decisions about their safety.”
He is right. If there was a real missile threat, those reporters had a right to know they were sitting on a plane the government thought might get hit. If there was not a real threat, then the whole catering-truck operation was theater, and the subpoenas were punishment for reporting on the theater. Either way, somebody in power treated the press like props, and then treated the truth like a crime.
I do not trust institutions on principle. I have seen too much. But I do trust my own eyes, and what I see here is a government that lied, got caught, and then tried to jail the people who caught it. If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.