Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
This week on One Decision In Brief, hosts Christina Ruffini and former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove explore what the FBI search of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s home and office says about America’s broken system for handling classified material and why so many senior U.S. officials - including President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and now John Bolton - have been investigated for mishandling classified documents. As a former intelligence chief himself, Sir Richard also gives us an inside look into how the UK’s policy of handling sensitive information differs from America's policy, including what happens once a public official leaves office.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Raffini: Hello and welcome to One Decision in Brief. I'm Christina Raffini, joined today of course by my co-host Sir Richard Dearlove. Sir Richard, how are you?
Dearlove: I'm very well, Christina.
THE BOLTON FBI SEARCH
Raffini: I did want to talk to you today about John Bolton, who's the former national security adviser during the first Trump administration, longtime Republican figure, legendary Washington mustache, a Iran hawk. He's been in political circles for a while. Last week, the FBI raided his house and his office. And while it was going on, members of the Trump administration were kind of live tweeting that it was happening. This search was reportedly linked to an issue with classified documents. The administration, the FBI is searching for classified documents he's either retained or mishandled. If you remember, that's something that President Trump was also charged with in Mar-a-Lago. Most of the people involved in that case have either been fired now or forced out. It's a very different FBI than it was even a couple months ago. I first wanna ask you, what is the deal with all these people having classified documents? President Biden was found to have classified documents. President Trump had boxes of them. It seems to me like this is a heck of a lot more common than any of us, either with or without a security clearance, and I have had a security clearance, were aware of. How does this happen?
Dearlove: Well, I think the general issue is that politicians are not very disciplined when it comes to handling classified material. And I mean, the fact is, if you're president of the United States or the prime minister of the United Kingdom, frequently you get highly classified material which comes to you in special handling procedures. But quite honestly, if you're the head of a big government, you're going to rely on your staff to do the proper thing with the documents after you've read them. I've always been puzzled, particularly by the Trump case. I mean, what on earth was going on? Weren't the staff around him responsible for making sure that once he had read the documents? I mean, if you're president of the United States, you put the documents to one side, a staff officer comes in and picks them up, and then there's a whole procedure for handling them thereafter. And maybe the president says, I'd like to read that again. Please keep it. But then there should be a special safe into which they're put, and then when he wants to read them again, a staffer goes and opens up the safe, which has a double combination lock that no one can get into except the person who knows the combinations. If you walked into my office when I was chief of MI6 at night, there is nothing in there. What I'm saying is there's not a single official piece of paper which can be seen or is accessible. By the time I was that senior, was I responsible for clearing up my office at night? I mean, I had been earlier in my career. No. My staff officer would come in after I left and make sure that everything was done by the book. And the book is absolutely clear cut, very strict. There might be things which were so sensitive that I had to personally handle them, and no one else was allowed to, not even my staff officers. But you have to sort of transpose this into the business of governing. I find the whole thing quite confusing. So what it suggests to me is that the staffers, the people immediately around the president, are not properly supervised, not properly trained. It's very hard to blame the principal when he's got a thousand and one other things to do which are pressing on his time.
Raffini: There's a couple different scenarios here between the three cases, between Trump, Biden, and Bolton. Right? With Trump, he had actual full boxes of documents. It wasn't like one here or there. And the Department of Justice investigators had said, hey. You have these. Please give them back. The archives had said, you have these documents. Give them back. And they had said no. That's a completely separate issue. It seemed like there was an active even an argument that he had the right to retain whatever documents he wanted to as president. There wasn't a lot of denial that he had them, just whether or not he should, you know, whether or not he could hold on to them, and he didn't wanna give them back. In Biden's case, it seems a little bit more like what you were saying. And of course, the more we learn about how that administration operated, it likely was a staffer going through those documents, reading them. You can debate whether or not he was struggling with the requirements of the job. But I do know from my reporting, he had a very close staff that I think would have been involved in everything you were just saying, bringing the documents, bringing them out. There were a few of them mixed up in his personal papers that were found at his home and at one other location. They were promptly returned as soon as they were discovered. There was no fight over returning them. They were given back. With Bolton, it's unclear if they're looking for actual hard copy files. Like, it may not be that they're going in there looking for a document that is stamped classified. What seems more likely to me is the Trump administration — remember, Bolton either fired or quit depending on who you ask. Bolton says he quit. Trump administration said he got fired. He then wrote this book, The Room Where It Happened, where he said some very not nice things about the president. He has been a thorn in President Trump's side for years. He was on the Kash Patel enemies list. Kash Patel is now the director of the FBI, and he ordered this search. It's more likely they're looking for the other part of classified documents, and you can explain this a little bit. Disclosures, like whether he sent an email to somebody and mentioned something that could have been classified or whether in his writings and his drafts for the book, he writes things that are classified or that they are going to consider to be sensitive information. I think that's more what they're trying to get Bolton on. Now look, there was an investigation into the book. The administration tried to stop publication and sue him for all the royalties of that book. They lost that in court. Bolton was able to go to print. He was able to profit from his book. There was an investigation, classified material that spanned both the Trump and Biden administrations that ended and was closed in the Biden administration. Now it has been reactivated. The thing you need to know as well is the FBI can't just search something on their own accord. Right? Kash Patel can't just say, go search John Bolton's house. He's been a pain in the butt. He's been trashing Trump all over, and he really has been trashing Trump all over lately. They had to go to a magistrate in both Maryland and DC, two different jurisdictions, present evidence. That evidence had to be new and timely. They couldn't have just said, well, a year ago, we had this thing, and now we wanna look again. It had to be timely and new evidence, sworn affidavit by FBI officers that they thought there was something that was there. Now it's unclear still what exactly that is, but we should be finding out, as this case unfolds. What is the threshold for that kind of intelligence?
Dearlove: Well, I know John well. And the question is, I mean, I've never quite understood in the US system when your access to official secrecy actually stops, because there is a system that you have of briefing former directors and former national security advisers, which we don't have in the UK. We have a very clear cut situation in the — when you're out, you're out. Unless there's a reason that the government want to brief you, because you might be regarded as an influential speaking head, for example. But, you know, when the door slams behind you in the UK, it slams behind you, and there's no access to official secrecy. I mean, the only time I was allowed back to see material was when the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War was being held. I couldn't possibly turn up at the Chilcot Inquiry, you know, which I had to do for long periods of time and be quizzed by the inquiry, without having access to all the papers, because this was years afterwards, or several years afterwards. But we do have a very clear cut and dried system in the UK, and I think there's more of a grey line in the States, and I think also in the States, disclosure is a bigger issue than it is in the UK, because it's not quite clear, you know, when you're completely cut off. I would imagine that John Bolton is a canny, clever guy. I'm sure he's got in his own mind a clear idea of what's disclosure and what's not, and he'll know what's in the public domain and what he can say. But on the other hand, there may well be senior people in the FBI, particularly, you know, when they've got a little bit of retribution in mind, who have a different interpretation of what disclosure is. And I mean, it is a pretty movable feast when you get into sensitive subjects. I mean, as I say, I think we're much, much more cut and dried in the UK. Now, if I wrote something now which drew on my professional experience, I would have to submit it to the government before publication.
BOLTON ON TRUMP AND SENSITIVE INTELLIGENCE
Raffini: We did have John Bolton on the podcast previously, and he told a very interesting story about how Trump treated sensitive or classified information, including things that intelligence officials specifically asked him not to use. Take a listen.
Bolton: And finally, as I think we've seen in the case of the indictment for the retention of classified information after he left the White House, he had no feeling for the significance of sensitive information. The most egregious example of that actually took place — I was out of the country, but my deputy was sitting in on that intelligence briefing, and it — I'm not revealing anything here, but there was a picture of a failed Iranian rocket launch, which of course gladdened our hearts when we saw it. But Trump was glad enough about it that he asked to retain the picture. The intelligence briefers and my deputy Charlie Kupperman in the room said, well, please, sir, don't let this get out of your hands. And he said, fine. No problem. They left the room. Before the CIA director was back at her office in Langley, Virginia, Trump had tweeted the picture out saying, the Iranians say we sabotaged that missile launch, but it's not true. I'm glad they believe it, though, or words to that effect, and put the picture as handed to him out on the Internet.
Dearlove: Well, look, that's a typical politicization of intelligence. I think we've all been through incidents in our careers, maybe not quite as serious and blatant as that, but I certainly had some problems when there were controversial policies being pursued by Her Majesty's government. I'm thinking specifically of the bombing of Serbia. I'm not going to go into details. Whereby number ten were desperate to publish something, and there were absolutely solid, 100% gold security reasons as to why the information absolutely should not be disclosed. And I think you run into these problems from time to time. British Prime Ministers, in my view, are generally pretty good. If you put your foot down and say, 'Absolutely no way,' they will respect that, but I can think of violations all the same. But in a way, that's a political judgment, and the politician has ultimate responsibility. But, yeah, I think it's a good example, and I mean, John Bolton brings that together. You know, this is a sort of conundrum for senior intelligence personnel when you're dealing personally with politicians who have, let's say, volatile political views and are likely to react in some way of their own choosing and not of your directing, if you see what I mean.
Raffini: I think also with this administration in particular, and particularly the second time around, you are dealing with a lot of people who don't have a lot of government experience, and that does make it, I think, I would imagine much harder for intelligence officials to not only present them with information. But if you were in that position, would you think twice about what things you were briefing the president or the agency head on if they could not be trusted to keep it quiet? If they were gonna reveal sources or methods, what goes through your head as the briefer, as the intelligence officer? Would you consider holding some of that back, or is that just simply not allowed?
Dearlove: I think it's not really allowed because if you have something crucial which affects policy, you're going to have to pass it on. And I mean, the problem is the better your sources and the more exposed they are, the more crucial the information is to the decision making process in government. The French were running a super, super sensitive source, and it's all now — there are books written about it — the man was in the S and T part of the KGB, the scientific and technical part. It's the Vetrov case. The disclosure of the intelligence that Vetrov produced eventually, because it was so overwhelmingly important both to the United States and to European security, allowed the Russians to identify the source, and the source was shot. I mean, it's as simple as that. And the problem is that if you have something which is so unique, so close to your enemy's crucial secrets, you're going to have to use them, and the more you use them, the more risk there is to the source. I mean, it's the conundrum of secret intelligence and how it relates to policy. There's no point in stealing someone's secrets, locking them in a safe, and not telling anybody.
Raffini: But do you think the job of intelligence officers and keeping secrets in general and even recruiting for people who can't tell people on Twitter, on Instagram, on LinkedIn what they're doing, do you think that job has gotten harder? Because it's such a transactional world and it's such a show me culture at the time. I would imagine it's getting more difficult, first of all, to get people to keep their mouths shut and also to recruit people who are willing not to say anything and to do all this work in a vacuum and do it just for patriotism or for doing the right thing.
Dearlove: Very, very difficult, as you say, particularly in the disclosure environment, the transparency environment in which we live. But you know, effective intelligence services give promises of lifelong secrecy to their sources. Otherwise, they find it very hard to preserve their crown jewels.
Raffini: I think we're gonna have to leave it there for today, and thanks so much for laying that all out. Great talking to you. As always, for more exclusive content and key discussions with global leaders, be sure to check out our website, 1decision.com, and of course, our YouTube. I'm Christina Raffini. We'll catch you next time.
