Over at Lawfare Benjamin Wittes not only continues to express his dismay at the imminent Trump nomination, but channels the dismay of some fairly important people:
I’m talking, of course, about the men and women who make up our professional national security bureaucracy.
Normally, such people are studiously apolitical. They’re public servants, after all, and they accept that they—as career officials—serve the institutions for which they work irrespective of whether the political leadership is Republican or Democratic. Some of them have opinions which they’ll share if asked. Some of them make a point—a discipline, you might say—of not having opinions.
That is in normal times.
I have not sure I have ever seen this cadre of professionals more unsettled than they are, as a group, today. It is not uncommon to hear people asking themselves whether they could continue in their current roles under Trump. It is not uncommon to hear people ruminate about whether the right course would be to resign or to stay and act as a check—which translates roughly to being an obstructionist of some sort or another. These are the murmurings that General Michael Hayden was channeling when he declared of Trump’s plans to target terrorists’ families: “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”
A Trump presidency would raise these issues not just for the military, but for the Justice Department, for the State Department, and particularly for the intelligence community, which wields a set of powers that are incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. Nobody knows this better than the men and women who administer those powers and are daily bound by the constraints imposed to prevents abuses of them. How will those people react when they, like Graham, are faced with Kagan’s choice of getting right with the leader or getting run over?
Mr. Wittes doesn’t pursue the follow-on question: if Trump is elected President, what is the future of the national security apparatus post-Trump, 4 or 8 years later? If this group of key workers choose to leave their posts, who then fills them? What if the neo-conservatives responsible for the Iraq war and other follies then become the occupiers of such positions? Will we see more fiascoes, reminiscent of the Bush II administration?
What if, instead, they chose to dig in their heels and disobey illegal orders? They’d be sacrificing their careers for the protection of the nation, in my eyes. Whether disobeying an allegedly illegal order would damage their employment prospects is an interesting question, and if the answer, in their eyes, is Yes, then how do they handle? As Wittes notes, Senator Graham has already begun to back down, and he’s one of the more outspoken critics of Trump; what does someone without the public profile do?
An interesting series of questions which I hope we never have to answer.
