A nation must think before it acts.
A Damage Assessment of Trump’s “Declassification Defense”
On Friday, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines informed Congress that her office will lead an “assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents” that were housed at former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. We can already anticipate broad outlines of what such an assessment may find – not in terms of the substantive policy areas and intelligence product that the classified documents cover because that is currently unknown, but in terms of the sources and methods potentially compromised by such disclosures based on publicly available information about the classified material at issue.