Seth Abramson (NYT) Is Such a Weirdo

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Seth Abramson (NYT) Is Such a Weirdo

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Seth Abramson

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Two months ago I wrote here about Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) that have afforded President Donald Trump, and every president in the last seven decades, extraordinary secret powers to suspend the basic rights of citizens in a domestic crisis with no Congressional or judicial oversight. Those powers essentially give any president the power to upend the Constitution if deemed necessary.

I was helped in my reporting on PEADs by Joel McCleary, a former aide on security issues to President Jimmy Carter who has now focused my attention on another top secret codicil to PEADs known as COGCON, which stands for Continuity of Government Readiness Condition.

“This is the layer the public has never been told to worry about,” McCleary explained to me. He said the warning system was modeled after DEFCON, the early Cold War military warning system that ranged from 1 to 5, with DEFCON 5 indicating ordinary peacetime and DEFCON 1 meaning that a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union had begun or was imminent.

McCleary’s notion is that many of the secret military and intelligence powers initially aimed at warning about a nuclear attack or other extraordinary national security threats are now being turned on political issues: namely the prospect that the Republican Party might lose control of both chambers of Congress, as polls are saying may happen in November’s election. “Note who works the switch,” McCleary said. “Formally, the secretary of homeland security is the president’s lead agent for continuity. In practice, the homeland security apparatus now runs through Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House who now sits atop an elevated office far above its old standing.

“The working hypothesis,” McCleary added, “is that Miller is the de facto head of the continuity machinery, which means that the on-off switch for the Constitution that COGCON entrusts to the president is, day to day, in the hands of an unconfirmed White House aide.

“The problem is that no legal framework distinguishes between a nuclear attack and a border dispute, between a civilization-ending pandemic and a political protest, between a genuine cyberattack on national infrastructure and a manufactured pretext for invoking extraordinary authority. The president alone defines the emergency. The president alone activates the response. The president alone signs the pre-draft orders. And no institution—not Congress, not the courts, not the military chain of command—has been given the legal tools to determine, in real time, whether the emergency is genuine and whether the response is proportionate.

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