Our government has hundreds of millions of secrets.
The US government classifies millions of documents every year - secrets that can only be seen by certain people, and under certain conditions. Who decides what is secret, and what isn't? How well is the classification system working? And can a president declassify any secret, at any time, just by thinking it?
We talk with Margaret Kwoka, law professor at Ohio State University, where she focuses on laws around government documents and access to government information. And if you want to learn more, check out our episode about security clearance.
Transcript:
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:00.60] Nick. Have you ever heard of something called an acoustic kitty?
Nick Capodice: [00:00:06.54] No. What is it?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:08.94] In 1967, the CIA spent millions of dollars trying to train domestic cats to spy on the Soviet Union. The outcome, quote, Our final examination of trained cats for redacted use in the redacted convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:34.83] So, in other words, cats make pretty bad spies. Yeah, it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:38.28] Turns out cats aren't great at following directions or taking care of surveillance equipment. And by the way, this project was a secret until 2001.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:49.98] Because it was so embarrassing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:51.54] No, I mean, you might think so, but it was actually because the project was classified.
News Clip: [00:00:57.18] In the top scientific and engineering facilities across the country, security regulations are keeping the most important of projects under the tightest of wraps.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:07.66] But whether we're talking about cats failing spy school or nuclear codes or the plans for D-Day, these covert programs share something in common with most things in our bureaucracy Paperwork. Except in this case, we are talking millions of pages of classified information that the government creates and manages every year.
News Clip: [00:01:31.69] America's national security state is a behemoth grown out of control. By one estimate, the government classifies three documents every second.
News Clip: [00:01:39.88] We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:50.80] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:52.15] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:53.56] And today we're talking about our government's classified information system. We'll also talk about how former President Donald Trump handled classified documents when he left office and why the Justice Department showed up at his home with a search warrant.
News Clip: [00:02:07.09] Dozens of boxes stored in the open, some allegedly holding descriptions of four nuclear capabilities and US defenses.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:14.74] Seized over 100 classified documents and eventually charged him with violating the Espionage Act.
News Clip: [00:02:20.44] The indictment also accusing the ex-president of showing national defense secrets to visitors at his New Jersey golf club, including military attack plans. The indictment also detailing alleged efforts by Mr. Trump to mislead the government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:34.87] But to start, let's roll back the clock. More than half a century to a 1960s training video for Department of Defense employees, which lays out why certain information should be classified.
Archival Audio: [00:02:47.56] Your work has a value to science that cannot be calculated, that has a value to your field and to the defense effort. Part of your responsibility to the project is the secrecy that enhances its value by denying its benefits to the enemy. And security measures are the means for ensuring it.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:03:08.65] The classification system is wholly within the executive branch. It's governed by an executive order issued by the President. It has created a classification system directing agencies how to handle national security secrets.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:20.83] This is Margaret Kwoka. She's a law professor at Ohio State University, where she focuses on laws around government documents and access to government information. The first executive order on classified information came from President Franklin Roosevelt during World War Two, and it mostly focused on how the military should handle secrets. It was expanded under President Harry Truman in the 1950s to cover secret keeping for all executive branch agencies.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:49.42] And real quickly, an executive order is basically a mandate from the president. Do this thing in this way. They do not ask for congressional approval.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:58.78] Yeah. And they stay in effect in perpetuity unless the president or their successor modifies them or Congress or the courts step in the executive order on classified documents, which is basically a rulebook on what can be classified, who can do it and how classified documents should be handled. Hasn't changed a lot since Truman. The latest update was by President Obama in 2009, which we'll talk about in a bit.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:24.76] So why wouldn't this be a law in Congress instead? Why give the president so much power over government secrets?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:32.08] This comes down to separation of powers and plain old logistics.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:04:37.84] Presidents have used their own authority to manage agencies and to protect national security. The president, under the Constitution, has some special prerogatives regarding national security and national defense.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:51.67] The president is the commander in chief of the armed Forces, for one, and is in charge of foreign relations. And both things are intrinsic to national security. But here's something to keep in mind. Classified information creates a barrier between government operations and our enemies, but also between our government and us. The public. And the executive order itself acknowledges this when it says, quote, Our nation's progress depends on the free flow of information both within the government and to the American people. Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national defense has required that certain information be maintained in confidence.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:33.40] You know, we talk about this all the time on our show. One of the tenets of our democracy is that we have the right to know what our government is doing. So a system for classifying information is, in effect, a limit on that transparency.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:46.84] It is.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:47.56] So given that, Hannah, I'm assuming that the president isn't just giving all these government agencies like the State Department or the military the right to make all of their documents a secret, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:58.18] Right.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:58.84] There are limitations. The big one, is that information can only be classified if it has to do with national security.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:06:06.85] So some of them are things that you might imagine if you were coming up with your own list. Some things are really narrow, such as military plans, weapons systems or operations. There's a category for intelligence activities, including covert action, intelligence sources or methods or cryptology. So these are sort of specified categories. Some other items on the list, however, seem a little bit broader and may be more subject to sweeping in sort of larger swaths of information. So, for example, there's one category of information that is scientific, technological or economic matters relating to the national security. Right. You could imagine a lot of things potentially falling in to that category.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:52.23] Okay, So you can't just classify something because it might make you or your colleagues look bad, Correct?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:58.89] The executive order explicitly lays out limitations. For example, you can't classify things like administrative errors or to, quote, prevent embarrassment to a person, organization or agency. And the bigger the secret, the thicker the classification box around it, both literally and figuratively. Secrets are ranked in order of how badly damaging those secrets could be if they are, quote, mishandled.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:25.65] So something like sharing it with a foreign enemy, for example. Sure.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:29.73] Or sharing it with the public or even leaving it out on your kitchen table where someone could see it. There are three levels of classification. Top secret, secret and confidential. We'll start with Top Secret, which is the highest order of classification, the kind of information that got its own Val Kilmer movie named for it. I'm not the first.
Clip from Top Secret!: [00:07:50.55] Guy who fell in love with a girl he met in a restaurant who then turned out to be the daughter of a kidnaped scientist, only to lose her to her childhood lover, who she had last seen on a deserted island and who turned out 15 years later to be the leader of the French Underground. I know it. It all sounds like some bad movie.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:06.22] A document gets classified as top secret if mishandling it could cause, quote, exceptionally grave damage to national security.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:14.03] Exceptionally grave. That sounds like some pretty heavy stuff.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:17.77] It is. This is the big stuff. Nuclear codes, intercepted communications, military plans, enemy capabilities, etcetera. And even within top secret information, something can be designated special access, right?
Nick Capodice: [00:08:34.15] Like on a need to know basis.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:36.22] Yeah. But in short, top secret information is supposed to be stored in special locations, accessed in tightly controlled settings, and should have multiple layers of security around it at all times.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:50.11] All right, Hannah, what is the difference between top secret and just secret?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:55.03] Secret is the next step down. So compared to top secret information, it has fewer restrictions on who can see it and how it's handled. And the lowest category, confidential information could just cause, quote, damage if mishandled.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:11.98] Just plain old damage. Not exceptionally grave. Not serious.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:16.06] Right.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:16.57] So how are agencies making sure that these documents are being read and only being read by the people who have the proper clearance and permission?
Margaret Kwoka: [00:09:24.82] Documents have to be marked with their classification. They can't be shared with anyone who doesn't have clearance. Then there's rules about storage, transmission, transportation of classified information, etcetera. And then agencies implement those with detailed, more detailed directives to their own staff about how they implement those requirements.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:46.27] We have a whole episode about the different types of security clearance where we go into this in detail. So I would recommend going back and giving that a listen for more info. But on the website of the General Services Administration, you can find a catalog of containers that have been approved for different levels of classification, everything from basic manila folders to a multi lock safe. And of course there is a whole system for encryption of digital classified information. All right.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:12.97] So who are the people who decide if a document contains exceptionally grave damage or just damage damage or if it should even be classified in the first place? I mean, it seems like it could be a pretty subjective thing.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:10:24.94] There are two ways to classify information.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:28.85] If you're the president, the vice president or the head of an agency designated by the president, you automatically have what is officially called, quote, original classification authority. For example, the secretary of defense and.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:10:42.14] Those individuals are entitled or authorized to classify new secrets. So information that is new that they've decided should be classified.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:54.26] So even people with the highest security clearance might not have original classification authority. Right.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:00.65] For example, over a million people have top secret clearance. However, at one point in 2021, only around 1800 people had original classification authority.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:11:11.99] But then there's a lot of other people, essentially everyone who has some sort of clearance to see those secrets, who have the authority to do what we call derivative classification. So that's to say a secret that was already classified when incorporated into a new document or re summarized or transmitted in a new form or compiled in a new way because it was already classified. Those individuals need to continue to classify the underlying secret. And so the new document produced will be derivatively classified. So they're not making the decision that the secret has to be secret, but they're saying, well, now that I have a secret that's going to be in this new document, I need to classify the new document too.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:55.73] This is to make sure that any information that should be classified doesn't get inadvertently mishandled if it's being used for different reasons.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:04.34] All right. How many new classified documents are floating around out there?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:09.26] Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million documents are classified every year. And this includes everything from reports, photos, emails or maps every year.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:21.98] Is that really necessary? Are there really that many things that need to be kept secret?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:28.01] Many politicians and government experts say that we have an overclassification problem.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:12:33.75] I think one of the most agreed upon facts about classification is that there is a problem of massive overclassification. People in both administrations, people who have been inside, you know, defense and national security agencies, people who have worked at the oversight body for classification have testified before Congress and come out saying we have a huge problem with overclassification. And there's a lot of reasons, good reasons of how this happens and why. But that's sort of the lay of the land. When we talk about classification, there's just there's it's it's just a really big system and it sweeps in a huge number of individual decisions to classify documents.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:21.54] And it sounds like the experience can vary a lot based on which agency you work in or what type of information you're dealing with. Right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:30.21] Yeah. And when it comes to the actual safekeeping process, on a day to day level, everyone does it a little differently. And that has created some inconsistencies.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:13:40.95] So inside a government office, they're working on a particular situation and, you know, they've decided that this kind of topic is now, you know, really going to pose that kind of danger. And as a result, that's the designation that we're going to use. And agencies do try to issue guidance about classification to their staff. But you're right, there's a huge amount of discretion.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:06.51] So it kind of depends on where you're working and the precedents set by people who came before you. Kind of like when you ask someone at work, why do we do it this way? And they say, because we've always done it this way. I mean, sometimes it makes sense, but it's not always because it's the best system.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:23.19] Right. And if you're wondering exactly how much guidance there is out there. A recent government report by the Information Security Oversight Office estimated that there were over 1800 different types of guidance across the federal government. That office, by the way, is a part of the National Archives and does exactly what it sounds like. It monitors and recommends policy for the classification system.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:14:47.94] They haven't come out with new numbers about classification in a while, actually, because they seem to have uncovered methodological problems with their reporting about how many classification decisions there were that suggest they were undercounting to a great degree, how many classification decisions there were.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:05.73] So it's hard to even count how many classification decisions there are.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:10.41] Yeah, it's kind of like if you were trying to rinse something in a strainer, but the holes are just a little too big.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:15:17.71] But even if we take the last year, they reported before they sort of discontinued reporting to reassess, there were something like, you know, just shy of 60,000 original classification decisions. That's 60,000 new secrets and then maybe shy of 50 million derivative classification decisions. So documents that incorporate or reproduce already classified secrets. So we're talking about a lot of classification decisions.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:48.25] 50 million!
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:50.38] And remember, even though there is guidance for people to follow, this isn't some universal computer program. We're talking about real human beings making high stakes decisions.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:16:01.39] One of the ways that that plays out is there are a lot of institutional and personal incentives to classify if there's any doubt. Right. So like you're looking at something and you're saying, I'm on the fence, but I'm going to err on the side of classification. And, you know, there's a few reasons that that happens. One is that there are penalties like the Espionage Act, for releasing information or not protecting adequately information that can harm the national defense, whereas there's not really, practically speaking, a consequence for classifying when you shouldn't have. Right? So if you're not sure if something will produce a bad result, obviously you don't want to harm the interests of the government and so you try to err on the conservative side of classifying.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:56.45] We're going to talk more about all of this, including how documents get classified and the consequences for mishandling classified information right after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:05.66] But before that break, just a reminder from both of us, it is no classified secret that Civics 101 is a listener supported show. If you support our mission and civics education or you're just a fan, consider making a donation in any amount. You can do that at our website, civics101podcast.org. We really, really appreciate it. We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. And today we're talking about classified information. Before the break, Hanna Margaret Kwoka said something interesting to me. There aren't really consequences for overclassifying material, but there might be consequences for under classifying it. So what would these consequences look like? What is the law there?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:54.99] Well, we've talked about it on this very podcast, and that is the Espionage Act of 1917. That act makes it a crime to mishandle information that could threaten national security. And it's not just spies. Some of the most famous cases are against people who shared classified information with the public. Take the Pentagon Papers, a study that revealed the scope of a secret military campaign during Vietnam that was leaked to newspapers by one of its authors, Daniel Ellsberg.
News Clip: [00:18:24.42] I can't regret having done what I knew at the time to be what I ought to do, my duty as a citizen. I have no no way that I can regret that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:35.65] Or when Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents about the government's civilian surveillance program to journalists.
Archival Audio: [00:18:41.47] While I sitting my desk certainly had the authorities to to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president. If I had a personal email.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:52.30] You said the Espionage Act covers crimes related to national security information. Is that the same thing as classified information?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:00.55] This is Margaret again.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:19:01.96] Well, it's interesting because actually the Espionage Act does not talk about classified records. It it does talk about information that could harm the national defense. And so those don't necessarily mean exactly the same thing in operation. Mostly the Espionage Act has been applied to those records that are classified. Mostly that kind of information that would harm the national defense would have been classified. So there is, you know, a large overlap here as a practical matter. But the reality is that the Espionage Act does not say on its face classified information and therefore doesn't require any sort of proof that the records are, in fact, classified.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:44.47] So in practice, classified information falls under this umbrella of national security in the Espionage Act.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:52.12] Yeah, but it also means that the Espionage Act could apply to information that is not classified.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:19:57.52] Certainly, if they are classified, that's going to, you know, help make the case that these are national defense secrets that would, you know, potentially harm the interests of the United States if disclosed. But when people move positions, they are required to, you know, leave behind and leave access behind to all of the records that they would have used in their official position. So that authorization really is tied to the position, not an individual, over their lifetime. And frankly, that's true even for non classified information. But that might be protected for some other reason. You know, the government has access to all kinds of things that are also kept confidential for non-classified reasons. So trade secrets that they might get from companies or personally identifying information, right? The government holds a lot of information about you and about me and individuals who work in government and have access to that for official reasons. Don't get to take it with them when they leave.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:56.34] So now I want to know about declassification. Like, how do we eventually end up hearing about projects like the acoustic cats or the government taking reports of UFOs seriously or the investigation into President Kennedy's assassination, for instance?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:11.31] Well, in short, because classified information should not be classified forever. Meaning all classified information should have an expiration date on its secrecy.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:21:22.08] So the executive order says normally it should be ten years, but in certain cases it could be up to 25 years.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:28.89] And by the way, the date it should be declassified by should be labeled on the information. The moment it is classified, it doesn't have to be ten years. It could be a few days, it could be up to 75 years.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:43.62] So no matter what, we, the public, should eventually have access to that information.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:49.71] Yeah, but it's not like there's a timed lock that just pops open on the drawer where the classified information is stored. Once you reach that date, in order for information to be declassified, it has to be reviewed usually by the agency that classified it in the first place to make sure that there is nothing that should remain classified because it's still relevant to national security.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:22:13.51] Agencies can declassify on their own. So whatever agency had the original classification authority can make a declassification decision. It is true, though, that oftentimes multiple agencies, you know, have some sort of interest in that information. And so there's a consultation process. You know, that agency has to consult with other agencies and so they can do it on their own. But it's cumbersome. And the same people engaging in that are, you know, also have other responsibilities.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:44.32] Well, Hanna, you and I have been in situations where we need ten different people to agree on the best final version of something. And frankly, it's not always the easiest or most efficient process.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:54.70] But there are some newer processes for declassification to help deal with the scale of that work because there is a huge backlog, not least because of that issue we talked about earlier over classification. For example, in 2009, President Obama's updated executive order created something called the National Declassification Center.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:23:14.92] And it is also supposed to take the initiative to engage in review and declassify records and seems to be working hard to do so. But even when it reports sort of large volumes of records declassified, it just pales in comparison to the number of documents that are being classified during the same period of time. Right. It's sort of like just overwhelmed by the number of new secrets as well.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:41.47] According to the most recent ISOO report, that's the Information Security Oversight Office, nearly half of the information that was slated for automatic declassification was not declassified, but it also wasn't exempted from declassification.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:59.14] So it sounds like even though we have a declassification system, it's not keeping up with the amount of information that it needs to sort through.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:06.94] And one more thing, Nick. People like you and me, journalists, sometimes we have a hand in declassifying material, too.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:24:15.76] And then the last thing I'll say is that actually the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, is sort of a back door way to declassification.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:25.99] That is the 1967 law that said that government agencies are required to provide unreleased or uncirculated information to the public upon request. Foi requests are a common tool for journalists reporting on government accountability and issues like that. And normally classified information is exempt from FOIA requests, but not always.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:24:47.59] So if an individual makes a request for records under FOIA and an agency claims that they're exempt as classified, people can go to court and challenge that, saying they think they should have access because even if they're marked classified, they weren't properly classified. Right. That they didn't really fall under the provisions of the executive order and shouldn't have been classified. So that's sort of another route to getting to to that declassification result.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:15.18] It's also worth pointing out here that FOIA isn't exactly a perfectly operating system itself. Hanna and I submitted a FOIA request five years ago, and we're still waiting on it. We hear all the time about the backlog and inconsistencies and wait times for people requesting documents using FOIA.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:33.54] And again, on top of that, there are different interests within government agencies on the part of the public and courts that all complicate the declassification process. And there's one other thing that has come up in the news recently that we should probably talk about the president's right or not to declassify information. All right. So this.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:56.05] This is where President Trump, when he left office, brought a bunch of official documents home with him, including a lot of classified information, all of which should have been turned into the National Archives when he left office. And at one point, he claimed that he had declassified all the classified information.
Donald Trump: [00:26:14.74] If you are the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it, because you're sending it to Mar a Lago or to wherever you're sending it. And there doesn't have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn't have to be. You're the president. You make that decision.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:36.15] So does the president have the right to declassify anything they want at any time?
Margaret Kwoka: [00:26:42.51] Another, you know, excellent and obviously highly relevant question that unfortunately has no super clear answer. But one thing I'll say is the executive order is wholly within the president's discretion. So these are orders issued by the president. Everyone agrees that the president has the authority to both classify and declassify records. You know, normally there's a process specified in the executive order about how to go through with declassification. There has been at least a suggestion by one circuit court that in another context that a president would have to go through the same procedures as anybody else, though I think that's potentially up for, you know, judicial interpretation of of what kinds of procedures would have to be be utilized.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:31.41] So, in essence, yes, a president while in office can declassify information. The norms would suggest that a president should follow the same process as anyone else. But those are norms that are now being tested.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:27:47.14] If we sort of hone in on what's really at issue with the, you know, with President Trump and whether these records could have been declassified. You know, if the allegations in the indictment are, in fact, proven true, it appears to be that President Trump has, you know, at least privately and, you know, potentially now on some recorded piece of evidence, admitted that he, in fact, did not declassify these records. So I think one thing is, you know, whether in some other circumstance, a president could declassify with less procedures than the executive order specifies or in some other alternative way that not actually would appears to have happened here. Right. And so I think that's sort of just an important point to start with. Also, this idea like you could declassify in your mind without telling anybody like these are really problematic. I think suggestions just for any normal functioning of government. So we don't know for sure because there haven't been cases testing what obligations or what methods a president might use to declassify. But I think regardless of what a court might find, a president had more or less prerogative to do. It didn't happen here. Right. At least what the indictment suggests.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:08.47] So let me make sure I get this right. On a practical level, there is a system for how to properly declassify information because that changes how the information is labeled, stored and shared. And if Trump did declassify something by just thinking about it, as he claimed he did, that doesn't really fit with all of the logistics that we have just spent the last half hour talking about.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:34.75] And furthermore, whether Trump declassified the documents as he claimed, these were still government documents and as such belonged to the American public, they were not his documents to take.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:29:48.01] There's a lot of long standing, important issues around reforming the classification system that are worthy of discussion at any moment in time. But since this is coming up around the issues that are raised by the indictment of former President Trump, I think it's really important for people to understand how, you know, when it comes to presidencies, the norms that are carried from administration to administration and the president's own commitment to following the obligations in the law have traditionally just been really important as a matter of setting up these kinds of potentially interbranch conflicts. Testing the boundaries of these is not something that most presidents have been interested in doing. They've sort of tried to faithfully follow them. And we've just never seen a situation that has kind of set up this conflict so starkly. And I think it's important for us to to remember how important norms are, because these are issues that we haven't seen tested in the courts. And now that we're going to I think we would all probably prefer if we didn't have have to be in the situation of having courts decide these really tricky issues about presidential authority.
Nick Capodice: [00:31:19.89] Oh. Well, that's it for this episode. We could tell you more.
Donald Trump: [00:31:25.63] But it's classified.
Nick Capodice: [00:31:27.70] This episode was made by Christina Phillips with Help from Me, Nick Capodice Hannah McCarthy and Rebecca Lavoy. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions Cooper Canal ScanGlobe, Kylo Katz, Emily Sprague, Farrell Wooten. The New Fools RCA Arc du Soleil broke for free Glove Box Trio Leo Sven Lindvall Ash sculptures. Timothy Infinite, SFX Producer ooyy El Flaco Collective and Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.