GSA Hides Trump Transition Meeting Notes with FOIA’s Ex. 5, New DHS Guidance Expands Surveillance of Social Justice Protesters, and More: FRINFORMSUM 7/30/2020

Trump Administration Redacts Transition Meeting Notes

Thanks to the 2015 Presidential Transitions Improvement Act amendments to the 1963 Presidential Transition Act, each presidential administration must “establish a White House coordinating committee and council of agency transition directors six months prior to the election.” The council, which deliberates on what preparations the administration is making for a potential transition, met on May 27 – and the FOIA sleuths at Government Executive requested the meeting minutes from both the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget.

GSA released one document – almost entirely redacted pursuant to FOIA’s widely-abused Exemption 5, often called the “withhold it because you want to” exemption. This discretionary exemption protects agencies’ “deliberative process” privileges, a wide carve-out that allows agencies to withhold “interagency or intra-agency communication,” as well as any agency-claimed “draft,” from the public.

The Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University, Paul Light, said, “If there’s anything that needs to be redacted that’s a sign that there’s something that shouldn’t be going on. This should be an open and fully transparent process.” Government Executive is appealing the “partial” denial.

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Former CIA Director Brennan Denied Official Records

In a sharp break from tradition, the CIA denied former director John Brennan access to his official records, “including his notes and any documents that he had reviewed and signed that were classified,” which he sought to compile his memoir. Brennan – a frequent Trump critic – reveals in his memoir, “Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad” – currently slated to be published in October – that in August 2018, President Trump issued a directive allegedly forbidding anyone in the intelligence community from sharing classified information with him (that same month, Trump threatened to revoke Brennan’s security clearance, something that Brennan said never came to pass because there was no legal basis).

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who frequently represents government whistleblowers and former intelligence officials navigating the murky prepublication review process, called the move “unprecedented”.

In January 2020 Brennan wrote to current CIA director Gina Haspel, arguing that “It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Agency’s refusal to grant my request reflects the current administration’s desire to punish and retaliate against me for speaking out as a private citizen — an abuse of power designed to chill the exercise of my First Amendment rights”. Haspel has not responded to the letter.

New DHS Guidance Expands Surveillance of Social Justice Protesters

New, unclassified Department of Homeland Security guidance reported by Lawfare authorizes DHS employees to collect information on protesters who threaten to damage statues or memorials, regardless of whether they are on federal property. The undated guidance comes as protesters are targeting and removing Confederate statues across the country. The expansion to include non-federal property is a significant expansion of Executive Order 12333, “United States Intelligence Activities,” which has traditionally been used to protect landmarks from potential terrorist attacks. The three-page memo, from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, is entitled “Job Aid: DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) Activities in Furtherance of Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues, and Combatting Recent Criminal Violence.”

Paul Rosenzweig, senior fellow at the R Street Institute and former DHS official during the W. Bush administration, told the Washington Post that the guidance is “a complete misapplication of existing authorities” and that President Trump “is morphing DHS into his private little rogue, secret army.”

Argentina’s House of Horrors: CIA Document Leads Human Rights Investigators to Previously Unidentified Clandestine Torture Center

Forty-four years after the Argentine military began disappearing thousands of citizens following the March 24, 1976, coup, human rights investigators have located one of the first clandestine torture sites used by state intelligence operatives. The clandestine center was identified after the declassification of thousands of U.S. intelligence records last year, among them a secret CIA report on the disappearance of an Argentine diplomat which stated that he had been kidnapped by agents of the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) and “taken to a house at Bacabay (sic) 3570 in the Federal Capital which SIDE rents and uses for official operations….”

The National Security Archive first called attention to the CIA document, entitled “Kidnapping and Assassination of Argentine Ambassador to Venezuela by a Group Associated with Argentine State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) Without SIDE Knowledge or Authorization,” by posting it on the day it was declassified, April 12, 2019. The Archive recently re-posted the formerly secret CIA cable, along with a State Department report on U.S. citizen Mercedes Naveiro Bender, who was kidnapped in May 1976 and held at the Bacacay house, according to a new investigative report by federal Judge Daniel Rafecas.

“Without the declassification of this document perhaps we would never have been able to identify this clandestine center,” said Albertina Caron, an assistant to Judge Rafecas. The discovery of the Bacacay facility, she noted, has vindicated victims who had described the house of horrors in testimony over the years. “For dozens of survivors,” Caron said, locating the place where they were tortured after more than four decades “has provided a catharsis.”

Since the discovery of the Bacacay house, human rights advocates have stepped up pressure on Argentina’s new president, Alberto Fernandez, to order the declassification of all remaining Argentine intelligence records from the period of dictatorship.

The U.S. Nuclear Presence in Western Europe, 1954-1962

Recent debates over U.S. nuclear weapons in Western Europe make it worth looking at how those forces got there in the first place. In the 1950s, when fear of Soviet military power was at its height, NATO allies like West Germany and Italy were remarkably compliant to U.S. wishes regarding the storage of nuclear armaments on their soil – and ultimately their potential use in a European war – according to newly released State Department and Defense Department records posted by the Archive. The governments in Bonn and Rome made no objections when Washington came calling and did not even pose questions about when or how the weapons might be used.

Other governments, notably France, did raise concerns but sometimes very different ones. In one important new document reporting on a sensitive North Atlantic Council meeting from October 1960, the Greeks wondered whether the Americans would consult with their allies before resorting to nuclear war, while the French, who wanted their own force de frappe, told the group their worry was Washington might not use their weapons at all in a crisis.

The posting provides a significant window into the delicate issues surrounding the creation and management of the nuclear stockpile in Europe.  Much about this topic is still classified. Along with allied perspectives, the documents describe inter-agency disputes between State and Defense over issues such as whether to grant certain allies’ custody over the weapons.

New Digital National Security Archive Collection Publishes Thousands of Declassified Nixon and Ford President’s Daily Briefs

The National Security Archive, with our partners at the scholarly publisher ProQuest, has published a new collection of declassified President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) from the Nixon and Ford administrations. The collection, The President’s Daily Brief: Nixon, Ford, and the CIA, 1969-1977, offers researchers an unparalleled look into daily intelligence briefings provided to the White House by the CIA from 1969 to 1977.

The new comprehensive 28,300-page collection adds 2,527 documents to the Digital National Security Archive’s ongoing procurement of PDBs, which are Top Secret documents containing the most current and significant intelligence information that the CIA believes that the President needs to know. The PDBs are so sensitive that CIA Director George Tenet once claimed they could never be released for publication “no matter how old or historically significant it may be,” and former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer described the document as “the most highly sensitized classified document in the government.”

The President’s Daily Brief: Nixon, Ford, and the CIA, 1969-1977 compliments the substantial collection of Archive documents from the Nixon-Ford era. Previous DNSA collections on the Nixon-Ford presidencies include “The Kissinger Transcripts: A verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1976”, “The Kissinger Telephone Conversations: A verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1977”, and  “The Kissinger Conversations, Supplement: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1977”.