Last Updated on August 6, 2023, 9:24 PM | Published: August 15, 2022
President Donald J. Trump’s breach of the nation’s security protocols and the connected attack last week on an FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio were politicized by people whose cultish fealty to Trump is seemingly endless.
Everyone in our nation should be shocked that Trump took classified materials from the White House when he left office, and that his social media attacks on the FBI inspired Ricky Shiffer’s violence against the bureau.
Republished in partnership with Oklahoma Voice under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Oklahoma Voice is a part of States Newsroom which is a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: [email protected]. Follow Oklahoma Voice on Facebook and Twitter.
Oklahomans should be particularly incensed about Jan. 6 insurrectionist Shiffer’s attack in Cincinnati, because it too closely resembles violence inflicted on our own state’s citizens by another domestic terrorist. Yet our feckless congressional delegation treats the FBI’s legal and warranted search of Mar-a-Lago as the actual crime, rather than the one in which Trump allegedly ferrets classified government documents into his basement.
On Aug. 11, U.S. Rep. Kevin Hern issued an uninformed and tone-deaf tweet about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
“A political appointee — with a known vendetta against President Trump — personally approved the raid of Mar-a-Lago? This tells us everything we need to know,” wrote Hern or someone working for him.
This is false and incendiary rhetoric deployed for political purposes, designed specifically to gin up many of Trump’s followers with short fuses and revolutionary aspirations. When Hern said, “This tells us everything we need to know,” I wondered, “to do what?”
For all my willingness to question authority, national security is woven into my psyche. I cannot shake it, and I get absolutely hawkish about people who share secrets they have sworn to protect. And it all comes down to a life choice made when I was 17 years old, and my duty to protect the information that I learned for, quite literally, the rest of my life.
Under the U.S. military’s delayed entry program, I enlisted as a U.S. Navy Intelligence Specialist when I still had one year left in high school. While I was at Recruit Training Command in San Diego for boot camp, investigators initiated a Special Background Investigation, coming to my old school to determine whether I was trustworthy with our nation’s closely guarded secrets.
During my time in the Navy, I constantly worried about the material for which I was responsible. As someone with anxiety issues, intelligence work was probably not the best choice, but there were no billets available for Navy journalists and I didn’t want to, as they say, “chip paint off the hull of a destroyer,” so I went intel.
I soon realized that was not the life for me, but I took national security seriously to the point where it haunted my dreams.
But even as the simplistic suburban conservatism of my youth gave way to a more worldly set of principles and values, I never let go of my belief in a system that protects essential information about military movements, the power dynamics of world nations and our methods of collection, which often involve real human beings who risk everything in their pursuit of valuable intelligence.
Trump’s disregard for proper storage and destruction of classified material and his reported predilection for showing such materials to guests at Mar-a-Lago is a thumb in the eye to anyone who has given over part or all of their lives to national security. He is subject to the same laws – including the Espionage Act — as all members of the intelligence community.
And yet, a Trump sycophant like U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is willing to change fundamental laws like the Espionage Act simply because Trump might have violated them. To paraphrase Trump himself, if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York, Paul would be ready to legalize murder.
If John Anthony Walker, a Navy chief warrant officer who spied for the Soviet Union for 18 years, could be convicted under the Espionage Act and spend the balance of his life in prison, that possibility for punishment applies to anyone who improperly shares high-level classified information. Walker was arrested two weeks before I went to boot camp, and he was a fresh cautionary tale told to us in our intel “A” school training.
The Espionage Act is not a law that can be applied selectively, or simply repealed when it becomes inconvenient for a political party. It protects all of us and it applies to all of us — even Donald J. Trump.
Feature photo: President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
George Lang has worked as an award-winning professional journalist in Oklahoma City for over 25 years and is the professional opinion columnist for Free Press. His work has been published in a number of local publications covering a wide range of subjects including politics, media, entertainment and others. George lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and son.
