Las Vegas Review-Journal

SECRETS STILL FLOW FREELY FROM WHITE HOUSE

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speech, and you have to show there’s a compelling government purpose for doing so,” said Norm Eisen, the top ethics lawyer in former President Barack Obama’s White House Counsel’s Office.

“Iftheyhave­takenevenb­aby steps — much less what appear to be giant strides — into the area of muzzling the normal, permitted recollecti­ons about the nonclassif­ied and nonconfide­ntial aspects of White House service, then that’s going to trigger the First Amendment protection,” he said.

It is routine for White House officials to be required to sign confidenti­ality documents acknowledg­ing that they may not publicly disclose classified informatio­n to people who do not have the proper clearance.

Beyond classified informatio­n, however, several senior officials who worked for Obama said they were never asked to sign a broader confidenti­ality agreement during their time in the White House.

Trump’s demand that his aides sign a confidenti­ality agreement was first reported this week by The Washington Post, but White House officials who have signed one disputed part of that report, which said an early draft of the nondisclos­ure agreement would have subjected staff members to fines of $10 million for each time they violated it.

Two officials said in interviews that a document with similar terms had been circulated during the transition between Trump’s election and his inaugurati­on, but it was widely ridiculed by aides as a misguided tactic by the president-elect’s personal lawyers, and was never used.

Still, such agreements have been a staple of Trump’s business and personal dealings, and he is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Stephanie Clifford, a pornograph­ic film actress better known as Stormy Daniels. Trump’s lawyers claim she violated a confidenti­ality agreement by publicly alleging she had an affair with him, which they say has exposed her to at least $20 million in damages.

Nondisclos­ure agreements were also a preoccupat­ion of Trump during his presidenti­al campaign, and after the election the president-elect had asked for agreements fashioned after the ones he used at the Trump Organizati­on, his real estate company, for everyone coming into the Trump White House.

Among the supporters of the move were his daughter, Ivanka, and Jason Greenblatt, his longtime lawyer who would join the White House staff as the president’s chief internatio­nal negoti- ator.

Mcgahn had warned Trump repeatedly that it would be difficult to bind federal employees to such an agreement, but the president pushed back, believing that its existence could act as a deterrent to would-be leakers, a person with direct knowledge of the discussion­s said.

Still, Priebus and Mcgahn repeatedly delayed responding to Trump’s request. By April, amid a rash of embarrassi­ng leaks, they could hold him off no longer.

But if Trump thought that the use of a tactic commonly used in the tabloid-fueled business and entertainm­ent circles in which Trump has existed for decades could plug leaks in the White House, he was mistaken.

Secrets from inside his administra­tion have continued to gush out in the months that followed, in part, officials said, because few people around the president believed there would be any legal consequenc­es for violating the confidenti­ality agreement.

In fact, that message was quietly reinforced by the counsel’s office even as aides signed the agreements last year, several officials said.

One former official said that he recalled being told that the document was merely meant to reassure the president. The official said that no one in the White House thought they were signing away their First Amendment rights.

A senior White House official said when aides sought to clarify whether they would be able to speak in specific instances — to fulfill a request from a congressio­nal oversight committee, for example, or to field a question from a lawmaker — Mcgahn would reassure them they had wide latitude. Current and former officials said the agreement contained sweeping caveats stating that it was consistent with whistleblo­wer protection­s and other oversight and disclosure laws that apply to federal workers.

At the same time, lawyers in Mcgahn’s office went out of their way to ensure that anyone who had access to particular­ly sensitive informatio­n at the White House signed a copy.

One official who had not been present for Priebus’ initial request was later told by a White House lawyer that since he had been involved in many potentiall­y controvers­ial matters, he should probably sign the nondisclos­ure document, which he said he promptly did.

Trump’s White House has also broken with convention in trying to impose written nondisclos­ure agreements in other instances. A small group of journalist­s scheduled to travel on a trip to Afghanista­n with Vice President Mike Pence were instructed in December to sign a confidenti­ality agreement before they would be given the details of the trip, for security reasons.

Reporters regularly agree to embargo logistical details of trips to war zones, but are not typically asked to sign a document binding them to do so.

Jarrod Agen, the vice president’s communicat­ions director, said the military liaison for the trip had asked for the document to be signed. When editors at various news organizati­ons balked, White House officials backed down, agreeing to nullify it.

“All the reporters with knowledge of the trip decided to travel and agreed to embargo the details, making the document unnecessar­y,” Agen said.

But the limits of Trump’s antileak effort were best illustrate­d by the publicatio­n last month in Vanity Fair of an excerpt from a forthcomin­g book, “The Gatekeeper­s: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” that gave an extensive and revealing inside accounting of the first six tumultuous six months of the Trump White House.

The account was based on a series of interviews with Priebus.

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