We're only seeing a fraction of Trump's actual corruption. Why? The rest is "classified."

For many years, I've warned that Trump would use the cover of "state secrets" to carry out his abuses of power. Now we have more reasons to worry.

Since working in the first Trump administration, I’ve worried the president would hide his crimes inside the “compartmented” layers of the national security community. Those fears may be coming to fruition.

Years ago, we got a glimpse of what it might look like if Trump tried to stash away his criminal conduct in government vaults. Literally.

The morning of July 25, 2019, Donald Trump got on the phone with the president of Ukraine and committed what some of his own officials believed was a crime. Trump pressed Volodymyr Zelensky to gin up dirt on Joe Biden, the man most likely to challenge him in the next election. In exchange, Trump would release the money America was already supposed to have given Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression.

An American intelligence officer listening in was horrified. So were several of his colleagues. And before the sun set on that call, the West Wing began a quiet maneuver to bury what had just happened.

As The Washington Post first reported, a White House aide reportedly directed that the transcript of the call be moved out of the system where records of foreign-leader calls normally live, and onto a super classified computer where the most sensitive secrets are stored. It was even given “codeword” status so that fewer people had access to it. The secrecy apparatus built to protect the United States from foreign adversaries was instead being used to hide Trump’s transgressions.

This is how Trump’s first impeachment came into the world. A whistleblower inside the spy world saw what was going on, sent a formal complaint through the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson, who read the complaint, judged it credible, and did what the statute required: told Congress. That was the summer of 2019. The rest is history.

Then, this past week, the Trump administration announced that both men have been referred to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, decried what is an obvious act of retaliation. The criminal referral, he said, “will amount to nothing because no misconduct occurred.” In the long run, he’s almost certainly right about that. But the point of the referral wasn’t to win a prosecution. The point was for the White House to send a message to would-be whistleblowers in the national security world: shut up, or be shut up.

Let’s be frank with ourselves about what’s happening. Trump has stacked the intelligence community with loyalists whose allegiance runs to him, not the Constitution, from Tulsi Gabbard at the DNI and John Ratcliffe at CIA to partisan hires throughout the inspector general offices. When you combine that personnel picture with a White House willing to weaponize the classification system, you’ve suddenly got shock troops with security clearances, willing to carry out Trump’s revenge in the dark.

The clearest evidence of this — and one the mainstream press has largely missed or under-covered — is National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Trump signed NSPM-7 last September, ostensibly to counter domestic terrorism. In practice, it redefines terrorism to include views associated with “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-Christian” viewpoints. Then it orders the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (a nationwide network of agents created to hunt al-Qaeda) with targeting Americans who hold those views. Those moves are already underway. The FBI’s 2027 budget even includes a new “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center” that would pull staff from ten federal agencies to carry out Trump’s crackdown.

Why aren’t you hearing more about this? Because the investigations are classified. There’s not enough to be up in arms about if you don’t know who is being investigated and how many people are being monitored. Only time will tell, as Trump’s team tries to bring yet more threadbare prosecutions against his political opponents. That’s what is so insidious about the directive. Unlike Trump’s usual missives against his enemies (his social-media posts demanding that his foes get prosecuted or other public acts of retribution), NSPM-7 is being implemented through secret channels.

Just last week, Congress temporarily extended Section 702 of FISA — a powerful foreign surveillance power that sweeps up some Americans’ communications without a warrant. I’ve long supported 702 as a critical crime-fighting tool against terrorists, as long as it has the right protections in place. But the Brennan Center has documented how the FBI has already abused it against protesters, donors, journalists, and sitting members of Congress. In the hands of an administration that has formally classified dissent as terrorism, its potential for abuse is breathtaking.

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies appear to be wielding secret powers for influence, legacy-building, and enrichment, too.

For instance, the president seems to be using a classified White House facility as a pawn in his latest “pay-for-play” scheme. Last year, Americans watched in shock as Trump literally bulldozed the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom dedicated to himself. Trump began soliciting donations for the dance hall from major corporations. Members of Congress have alleged this is tantamount to bribery, i.e. companies providing funding for a personal Trump project with the obvious expectation that they’ll get some kind of preferential treatment from his government.

What Trump didn’t say at the time — and what has since become public in legal filings and Trump’s own comments — is that the White House is claiming it has the authority to build this unauthorized ballroom because it’s doing something secret underneath it. As usual with Trump, the secret didn’t keep long. He told reporters he’s upgrading the classified presidential bunker below the White House. In other words, Trump is using his authority to operate a super-sensitive government installation as the justification to build his own vanity project on top of it. (By the same logic, there’s no reason to think the president couldn’t also build a Trump Tower on top of Area 51, as long as he claims to be doing renovations on the latter.)

But what about personal enrichment?

Last month, the Justice Department quietly handed Congress a 2023 memo from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team with “damning evidence” revealing that investigators believed Trump stole classified documents before he left office in his first term because they were relevant to his private business interests. Some of the material recovered at Mar-a-Lago was so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government were cleared to see it. Volume II of Smith’s final report remains suppressed by Trump’s own Justice Department. If he was doing this on his way out of power in 2021, what is he doing with classified intelligence now?

We have hints.

The markets keep producing anomalies that shouldn’t exist, tied to Trump’s own official decisions. Almost every week now, we seem to hear about bullish bets getting placed mere minutes before Trump makes a bombshell announcement… or reverses a tariff policy… or pauses strikes on Iran… or sends U.S. special forces to infiltrate a foreign country. Each time, someone has made massive bets in the stock market or prediction market ahead of time that results in a windfall in the millions, hundreds of millions, or billions.

Either a world-class investor is spying on the president, or someone close to him is trading on insider information. But those are just the suspicious trades you can see.

What you can’t see is the river of classified intelligence — including analysis on foreign markets, international leaders, military operations, and beyond — that flows through the White House every single day. How do we know Trump’s team isn’t trading on state secrets? How do we know they’re not going onto Polymarket after the morning intelligence briefing and placing bets on something “happening” or “not happening” based off of information no one else has, such as intelligence reports produced by billion-dollar spy equipment and exquisite collection architectures that no one else has?

The answer is we don’t.

We don’t know because the information is so closely guarded. We don’t have the ability to draw connections between which of Trump’s staff members have access to sensitive classified information and which of them are making suspicious market trades. Unfortunately, the agencies that would normally launch such investigations have been gutted and/or are run by Trump loyalist who would never let such criminal probes be opened.

The scenarios of how Trump might hide his corruption in classified channels get darker still.

Remember the 2024 Supreme Court oral arguments about presidential immunity? During the debate in front of the high court, a question was posed: could a president order Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival and escape prosecution by calling it an official act? That was a hypothetical then, posed for illustrative purposes to suss out a point about how far the commander-in-chief’s powers might go if presidential immunity was interpreted too broadly. Now it feels like an omen.

Since returning to office, Trump has ordered the kidnapping of one foreign head of state and the assassination of another. At his direction, Delta Force seized the sitting president of Venezuela and flew him to New York in handcuffs, a decision made in part because Trump didn’t like the way Nicolas Maduro mocked his dancing style. Months later, the U.S. military carried out the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran, whose regime had been targeting and mocking him since the first term.

“I got him before he got me,” Trump told ABC News.

Whatever you think of those targets, it’s clear that the president is high off the power to kill and capture. And with a Supreme Court majority suggesting such actions may be beyond criminal reach, Trump will surely go after more of his foes abroad using clandestine means.

But who’s to say the next target will be a foreign one?

Trump would prefer no one ask that question. That’s why he’s stripped security clearances from his political opponents — Cheney, Kinzinger, dozens more, myself included — silencing critics and cutting off channels of informed public dissent. It’s also why his team has referred two spy agency employees to DOJ for prosecution. They sounded the alarm about Trump’s attempted quid-pro-quo in Ukraine. Now he’s sounding his own alarm: rat me out, and I’ll silence you.

Our only way around this is to counter-balance Trump’s intimidation. It’s hard enough for whistleblowers to come forward in normal circumstances. But it’s even harder from within the national security community, where they’re trained in the protection of secrets and face a more formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent disclosure. So we must make clear that truth-tellers will have support on the other side.

That’s the primary reason our organization has spent so much time talking about — and funding — the legal defenses for whistleblowers who stepped forward. We have to show them that if they make the brave decision to expose wrongdoing, they’ll be protected. We’re also continuing to remind military and intelligence personnel about the lawful mechanisms they have to report unlawful orders.

Because if we don’t — if we let the national security community become a vault for Trump’s crimes — the worst of what this president does won’t come to light for years.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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